The Black Cauldron

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Hardbackyoyo
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The Black Cauldron

Post by Hardbackyoyo »

Would any of you be interested in Disney releasing a "special extended edition" of The Black Cauldron? I know it isn't one of Disney's best movies, but a lot of the problems had to do with the cuts that were made. Jeffrey Katzenberg cut 12 minutes from the movie himself. Wasn't Disney's original plan to make this a PG-13 movie?

Please call Disney at 847-723-4763 to make your requests.

Go to these links for more information:

http://michaelperaza.blogspot.com/2010/ ... art-3.html

http://kylesanimatedworld.blogspot.com/ ... an-it.html

Here's an interesting extra video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8zQHO40Cys
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Angeldude98
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Angeldude98 »

Definitely!!! This is one of the most underrated Disney films ever! The cuts were made due to the dark content, but it would be great if the film was completely restored or these scenes at least be made available as special features. A good "The Black Cauldron" DVD/Blu Ray is long overdue!!!
Hardbackyoyo
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Re: The Black Cauldron

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That's great! Did you call Disney? It would also be great if you told your fellow Disney fans. The more people call, the more likely Disney will release an Extended Edition.
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Hardbackyoyo »

Does anyone else want to express their thoughts about this?
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by DisneyAnimation88 »

After reading Michael Peraza's blog on the production I doubt we'll ever see the cut scenes released by Disney :lol: I remember being obsessed with this film for a while when I was younger, probably because it was so different to what I was used to seeing in Disney films. It would be nice to have a good, comprehensive re-release of the film on Blu Ray but I really wouldn't count on the missing scenes being on it if there is one.
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Jules
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Jules »

Fascinating article on Collider. I hope all the info is accurate. (I found the parts detailing Deja's criticisms of Kahl's initial designs slightly misleading in tone compared to what Deja originally wrote on his blog, but perhaps I am mistaken.)

Expect to spend around 10 minutes reading.

https://collider.com/the-black-cauldron ... explained/
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by blackcauldron85 »

^ About Milt's concept art: The article touched upon it, but Milt's drawings didn't deviate too much from what Disney had previously done, so while they were excellent as far as draftsmanship, they weren't as creative as the new artists would have liked, I think.

"I remember 12 signatures on one model sheet."- Yeah, there were a lot of cooks stirring the pot of this film.

I'm surprised that the animation team didn't know that the holographic effects were discussed as far as theater marketing.

Thanks for sharing the article, Julian!
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Rumpelstiltskin »

As I recently posted on this board:

(Brad Bird about Tim Burton)
“He did these amazing designs for Black Cauldron that were better than anything they had in the movie—he did these griffins that actually had claws for mouths, and they were really great and really scary, in the best way. But because they were unconventional, [the studio] ended up doing some half-assed dragon in the movie.”
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by DC Fan »

Of course we are!

Besides, when the movie was going to be released originally on DVD would have been a Special Edition but then it didn´t happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rORW6dxQYoQ

However, I´m sure that will happen and the movie will be released on BD by the time the live action movie series start production.

This movie is one that Disney barely want to acknowledge it exists...Never understood why when there are several others that are on the same level or much worst (Chicken Little, Home on the Range) and at least they are available on BD. However, from time to time there are glimpses of hope like the 2 pack Black Cauldron Funko Pop (Taran and Horned King) that happened. On the one hand it was amazing on itself that it happened. More so when there are still popular movies that are in need of Pops but what´s even more unbelievable is that The Horned King was one of the characters selected. If anything, this character is the main reason Disney doesn´t want anything to do with the movie (yet Chernabog, a real demon is OK) and made it into a figure.
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Disney's Divinity »

Jules wrote:Fascinating article on Collider. I hope all the info is accurate. (I found the parts detailing Deja's criticisms of Kahl's initial designs slightly misleading in tone compared to what Deja originally wrote on his blog, but perhaps I am mistaken.)

Expect to spend around 10 minutes reading.

https://collider.com/the-black-cauldron ... explained/
I assume you have to be a member to see the article?
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blackcauldron85
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by blackcauldron85 »

^I'm not a member & it worked for me. I think it takes a moment for it to fully load. Underneath "Instead, it happened behind the scenes in a series of cramped offices on the Burbank lot." it has sections that load.
Does the Archive.org version work for you? https://web.archive.org/web/20200820121 ... explained/
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by Disney's Divinity »

Oh, okay. I got it to work, thank you!

I have to give credit to TBC's failure for unintentionally setting up Musker's & Clements' careers. Everything has a purpose. WIthout TBC, TLM, B&tB, etc. may have never happened. I don't dislike Bluth, but I get why he could be polarizing. His statements remind me of all the debates about Disney Essence and "What Would Walt Do?" on this forum over the years, lol. At some point, you have to step out of Walt's shadow because you're never going to replicate him.

It's a shame Burton was stifled at Disney. He wasn't the first or last, but ultimately leaving was probably the best decision he could've made. I liked Kahl's concept drawing of the Horned King, on the point that I'd have liked the horns being longer and more curled like a buck's. Plus, the crown was nice and the medallion buckle; the look reminds me of Jafar's a lot, actually, with the way there's fabric draped on the sides of his face.

And I'm surprised they replaced Hayley Mills for Eilonwy. Is it just me, or do Sheridan and Mills not sound that much different from one another? I can definitely believe live-action was used for the cauldron. Those scenes where its present always looked very odd in a way I couldn't place, now I understand.
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by blackcauldron85 »

Disney's Divinity wrote:Is it just me, or do Sheridan and Mills not sound that much different from one another?
Yeah, I think they sound pretty similar, too. I'm happy with how Eilonwy turned out, so I'm good with the actress change, as much as I like Hayley.
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Re: The Black Cauldron

Post by blackcauldron85 »

I ordered some old magazines, and this really cool (but super-technical) article was in one that came today.

Adamson, Joe. (1985, July). What’s Cooking in The Black Cauldron. American Cinematographer, Volume 66(Issue 7), 60–68.

The camera negative for The Black Cauldron is like no other on earth.

Of course, like every Disney animated feature since Snow White in 1937, this color movie is being recorded on a Plus-X black and white negative, in what the Disney Studio calls its SE, or successive exposure, process, a variation on the old Technicolor separation concept, but with the three black and white exposures of each frame (photographed through three separate color filters) recorded successively on the same strip of film, rather than on three separate rolls contained in three separate cameras.

And, like no Disney feature since Sleeping Beauty in 1959, The Black Cauldron is being released in Technirama, meaning that these successive exposures were recorded vertically on the Plus-X in the camera with a 1.5:1 squeeze, to be unsqueezed later and rotated to the proper horizontal angle to make the 65mm inter-positive from which 65mm dupe negs and 70mm release prints are struck.

But, like no Disney or any other feature prior to The Black Cauldron, each matte frame for scenes requiring composite printing is recorded immediately after the corresponding frame of the basic shot, since it requires little more than adjusting the lighting and the cels of the same set-up, and you can’t beat the registration you get by shooting them both in conjunction. The two images can then be composited at the inter-positive stage, using 65mm printers not in existence two years ago.

So to look at the camera negative of The Black Cauldron is to see six successive widescreen black and white frames, all looking like male and female cousins of each other, trailing along sideways like squashed boxcars at a crossing, on a single strip of 35mm film.

This is explained by Phil Meador, rattling off emulsion numbers and flow chart steps like a pitchman selling second mortgages…

Today, when Patty Peraza lays out the effects animation on the vision conjured up out of a washbowl in one of the opening scenes, her job requires more than the effective animation of visionary images out of the depths of the maelstrom to the surface of the water in the bowl, it necessitates the balancing and sandwiching of visual elements that must overlap, overlay, underpin, accentuate, matte, distort and diffuse each other throughout the ten passes the scene will require to photograph.

A static painting of a whirlpool serves as the basic background, with rotating distortion glass causing small ripples to give the illusion of movement, the two separate levels of swirling water overlay that (one for the funnel-shaped vortex and one for the eddying surface), then the various phantasms of the vision must appear to roil up out of its depths and cross-dissolve from one level of water to the next, then bubbles dance across this activity, animated ripples undulate throughout, and backlit highlights are added to the ripples and to the funnel of the whirlpool itself. The background and the phantasms are both distorted with the distortion glass, while the whirlpool is being diffused as well as distorted, and the various decorations being dragged along for the ride have to glisten in crystal clarity. The waves of distortion are rotating in one direction for the background and the whirlpool, in the reverse for the phantasms.

But it’s not that simple. The circular distortion glass is ground with degrees of distortion increasing from its center to its edges, and the separate passes of the vision sequence will be shot through differing degrees of distortion, with the rotation of the center reserved for the whirlpool at the very background of the action, and the greatest breakup at the edges earmarked for the images of the vision. And those images, appearing in various murky colors, can appear under the bubbles, ripples, highlights and swirls that represent the watery medium they’re appearing in, but must appear to be over the whirlpool and its highlights at the base of the scene. This means that when the whirlpool and its highlights are photographed, it will have to be with a black matte cel [or “mask,” as the Disney artists refer to them) of each frame of each vision overlaid. But, since those visions are being distorted, and distorted by the heaviest breakup factor at the edge of the glass, then each mask will have to be distorted in precisely the same measure at precisely the same point in the glass. The distortion glass is calibrated so this matchup can be effected within a fraction of a millimeter.

The cameraman won’t shoot all this unless Patty is there to hold his hand.

… Lloyd Alexander’s bleak, Gothic 5-volume mythological fantasy The Chronicles of Prydain was published in the mid-60s… Prydain was acquired by the studio in 1971… When Mel Shaw, a 44-year veteran of the animation business, inherited the project in the mid-70s, it became his lot to whittle the five separate storylines (only one of which, the second, is called The Black Cauldron) into one, and streamline the cast of main characters from over 30 to about a half dozen. (“We tried to use only the characters whose names we could pronounce,” jokes Joe Hale, the film’s producer…). The Horned King, killed off in the first five volumes, became the arch-villain that would sustain the whole film. (“We thought he would make a good animation character,” admits Hale, “mainly because he had horns sticking out of his head.”)

…Outsiders like designer Mike Ploog and actor John Hurt were so intrigued by preliminary artwork on the project that they found their initial reluctance to get involved melted away out of sheer enthusiasm. A younger staff began to fill the halls at Disney – ex-Lucas and ex-Bakshi virtuosos, and young artists originally recruited for Tron, with its elaborate matting, backlighting, and re-photographing problems…

“You can’t have a little cartoon character battling the Horned King,” Hale points out, while calling Cauldron Disney’s most ambitious animated project since Pinocchio. This makes it the first Disney animated project to try being ambitious in a post-Walt world, a film scene dominated by Lucas and Spielberg, and the end result bears their stamp – particularly in the ominous roiling red cloud-tank sky over the Horned King’s castle, in the Horned King’s resemblance to Darth Vader, and in the ghoulish, apocalyptic Raiders of the Lost Ark finale. “We’re trying to use everything that’s available on the market now in the way of new things,” claims Ted Berman, one of the picture’s three directors. “We’re using effects that have been developed by other people, just as Lucas and Spielberg are taking things from our Duck shorts and Goofy shorts and Chip ‘n Dale shorts and putting them into live-action films.”

“There’s a touch Spielberg uses in his movies where he shoots into light and gets it radiating,” remarks effects animator Don Paul. “We really loved that type of scene and had a chance to do it in one of these shots. But when you’re drawing it, you get flat shapes. I had to figure out a way to get a tonal light effect that wasn’t flat, that would give dimension and perspective.”

Simple diffusion of animated light rays would solve nothing. Actual backlit animation photography would create a steady glow, rather than the necessary radiating rays. The desired result was finally achieved by taking animation drawings of the Horned King in movement, creating Kodalith-like cels with a negative image of those line drawings, bottom-lighting them, then trucking in on each through a slitscan lens, creating a silhouette with beams of light that moved when the figure moved. The eventual image combined the slitscan silhouette (bottom-lit through a blue gel) with animated smoke drifting by on a separate pass to add dimension to the light rays (bolstered by a mask cel on the bottom-lit pass, making some of the clouds more opaque than others) and an animated fire smoldering behind the character to tone down the effect of the silhouette. A literal hell of an entrance.

Once the Cauldron itself moves into high gear, it gives off an atmospheric ectoplasm composited from a variety of separate effects: animated mist, backlit and diffused; a photographic record of dry ice vapor rolling out of a three-dimensional model of the Cauldron and the steps at its base, registered to match and matte the artwork Cauldron; footage of incense smoke doing the same thing; and laser light beams deflected through a variety of distortion glasses and filmed on Tri-X at 64 fps. To keep the bottom-lit ectoplasm looking dimensional, and not simply like another burned-in level of photography, it is combined with an airbrushed mask of the objects it is drifting around, breaking up the light just enough to give the impression that it is passing behind as well as in front of the corpses in the Horned King’s living room.

For perspective downshots of the Cauldron at the height of its frenzy, the effects animators got together with the fellows from WED Enterprises… and rotated their laser light in an atmosphere of fog machine mist. This created a nearly solid-looking tunnel of light, which could be photographed through a lens positioned at its center, then, once each frame was transferred to a separate Kodalith, could be touched up on the drawing board before being combined with the other elements of the scene to create an atmosphere of cyclonic fury.

Lighting alc0h0l in the base of a Pyrex cylinder was good for a similar effect when the air currents were right: a tornado of flame, ready for the slow-motion-to-Kodalith process. Subjected to the same treatment were mini-Hindenburgs, created by igniting balloons filled with hydrogen.

Computers, too, came to aid of this medieval tale, both as an animation and as a photographic tool. Even at Disney, no way has been found to get character animation out of a computer. Like robots, computers can’t act, but they’re great at moving large, cumbersome objects - such as the ancient, Norse-looking ship that enters the fray at one point in the action, and the Cauldron itself, a gnarly, elaborately festooned entity that needs to pivot, turn, float towards camera and off to the horizon in perfect perspective. In both cases, though, what the computer animates is a series of lines and vectors; artists still have to be called in – in this case “cleanup men” rather than animators – to turn the nodes into knobs and the flat planes into knotted wood.

Few objects are more cumbersome than Disney’s two-story multi-plane camera, which dates from the 30s, and computers have come to the rescue here by increasing the range of exposure times possible, being able to dictate and program the exposures necessary to balance the light on an elaborate cross-dissolve, and keeping the focus and f-stop controls at eye level with the artwork, eliminating the need to climb the old ten-foot ladder for every lens adjustment.

Computers did the basic animation in the step-by-step process of registering the “Bauble” on film- Eilonwy’s floating, blindingly brilliant orb whose magical powers kept getting her in and out of trouble. A Kodalith mask and a backlit pass were okay for far shots, but the Disney artists were never going to settle for that kind of definition in the closer angles, so, once the animator had decided on a position for the Bauble within the shot, the computer shaded it with a rectangular highlight on its top and a crescent shade on the underbelly. When this drawing got to Ink and Paint, it was used as the basis, first, for a cel with a yellow orb, a white highlight, and an orange shadow, then for a mask cel whose negative would be sliced out of amberlith, a drafting material. Once the amber circle has been peeled from the coated cel, what was left was an amber sheet with a clear porthole, precisely registered. The amberlith was then used to print up a regular mask cel with an unshaded black orb in the same registery, and this mask was photographed with the characters as a normal exposure. The Bauble’s cel was photographed on a second pass against black at a 200% exposure through a D-10 diffusion filter, which served to smear its light all over the frame like Vaseline, but still give the little orb enough dimension to make it likable, in the Disney tradition, and (once again) keep it from being simply a trick of the light. As for the moving shadows a bouncing Bauble that bright would naturally cast, those were animated in the usual way, then transferred to cels that allowed them to cast their gloom semi-transparently over the backgrounds.

Normally, these would be painted black by hand from the animation drawings, then photographed on a 40 or 60% exposure to keep them from blotting out the background entirely. The Xerox process for making cels, in use at the Disney studio since the early 60s, is no more reliable when it comes to handling solid shapes than the Xerox machine at your local copy center. But there is a new method afoot for reproducing the animators’ artwork at the home of Mickey Mouse, and Mickey’s ears, like the shadows thrown by the Bauble, are perfect illustrations of why it became essential.

Animator dissatisfaction with inked cels is another item that dates from the 30s. Dick Huemer, who'd been animating for 20 years when he worked on Snow White, said later, "I resented the fact that some inker (who was a very skillful person, and I couldn't do inking if I tried) would take my drawings and go over the lines, so that when it was done it was another's work and not my original drawing. I thought, 'Why not shoot each drawing, that you have cleaned up, in some photographic process, and then it's your drawing on the cel?' I had no idea whether this could be done, and probably it couldn't at the time, but if a genius like Ub Iwerks had worked on it, perhaps it could have been worked out. But I went to Walt with it and his answer was no. He said, 'If you photographed the actual drawing of each animator, it would all be different, because everybody has a different pencil technique.' So the thing was dropped right there. Of course, Xerox is a different process, which rearranges the molecules or something, and it's not actual photography. In effect it takes your exact line and so it transfers the same vitality to the screen. I think it's tremendous."

In fact, Xerox is an electromagnetic process that depends on charging a field that will accept the Xerox powder in a way that reproduces the line, and Ub Iwerks is the genius who adapted it to animation. It allows certain mechanical advantages, such as enlargement or reduction of the size of the image, not possible in the straight transcription of inking.

But in two decades the drawbacks of this system have become apparent too. Besides creating dropoff in solid shapes, like shadows and Mickey's ears, it sometimes eliminates dropoff in a line the animator had intended to trail off; its line also casts its own imperceptible shadow, making it look fuzzy and indistinct, so its rendition of the artist's work is less than perfect. The Xerox powder liberally dusts the finished cel and requires extensive cleanup. Once that's done, the final line is still so unstable that it may crack, chip, flake or just crumble away before it can be painted and photographed. Also, the registration of the cels with the drawings is a tenuous affair; should one of these cels lose enough of its image to be deemed unusable somewhere between the Xerox machine and the camera (a not uncommon occurrence), the problems of creating a new cel that would line up with the others in the sequence, range from the difficult to the insurmountable.

When Dave Spencer, head of the studio's Still Photo Department, heard some of these painful stories, and animator's complaints that their line was still not reaching the screen in its purest form, he began to experiment with lithographic film. Leafing through graphics catalogs, he found a material routinely used for making color proofs and specifically designed to reproduce the yellow, cyan, magenta and black records of an image under high-spectrum (ultra-violent, mercury or halogen) light, and all it took was a personal contact with one of several companies already engaged in turning out this material to effect the modifications necessary to adapt it to animation - among other things, increasing the range of colors it would reproduce, thickening the base of at least some of the cels from 3 to 4 mil. to allow them to hold the weight of the paint, and punching the sheets with animation peg-holes for registration. The outcome of sustained negotiations over a period of time was widely trumpeted as Disney's new Animation Photo Transfer (or APT) process, which really is a photographic process and produces a much more faithful, as well as stable and well-defined, rendition of the animator's line than any other method of cel transfer yet devised. Not only does it retain the same blowup and reduction capabilities the Xerox process possesses, it handles Mouse ears like a breeze, it allows for variations in the width of the line just by adjusting a few controls, and has a range of sizes extending to what Spencer calls the "Super 10-Field" cel, which is 20"x43", nearly double the Xerox maximum of
12 1/2"x20". The Super 10-Field is used only rarely in The Black Cauldron, for crowded shots so full of squirrels, birds or Fairfolk (more mythology), they couldn't have been painted with accuracy enough for the 70mm screen without all that cel space. "It's never been done before," Spencer claims proudly. "We may never do it again."

Because APT is a negative-to-positive technique, any cel that becomes damaged on its way to the animation camera can easily be replaced in perfect registration just by pulling its negative out of storage and printing it over. And, because it is a photographic process, there is no limit to the number of images that can be recorded on a single cel (another area in which dropout makes Xerox disappointing).

The APT process is actually the high-contrast version of a less trumpeted but equally valuable technique whose development preceded it, in an attempt to solve the problems posed by an animated volcano in the short film Meet the World when it was made for Tokyo's Disneyland. The volcano proved imposing and the deadline limiting. Completion time for the sequence came and went before the problems of photographically rendering the animators' handiwork to a cel were licked, but that left the whole process ready and waiting for a big project like The Black Cauldron to come along.

What Bernie Gagliano managed to come up with was a continuous tone lithograph that could reproduce the shading and feeling of the artist's original drawing even in the case of a solid mass like the figures of Patty Peraza's vision. As an artist, Patty decided to animate the figures of that scene in charcoal on vellum paper to reach the texture she felt was right for the visionary aspect of the watery medium. The conventional solution for transferring this kind of thing to cel has been the airbrush, but if inkers can be accused of losing the feeling of a sharply-defined cartoon line, airbrush artists are hopeless for producing anything but vague approximations of solid forms in motion, and the airbrush mass tends to fluctuate in density from cel to cel.

By monkeying around with different kinds of both positive and negative stock and development time applied to each, Gagliano was able to come up with both the colored toplit continuous tone cel that maintained the texture of Patty’s original, and the requisite black high-contrast solid backlit mask, holding the shape of the charcoal drawings on both, while dropping out the competing texture of the vellum by polarizing his light.

Bernie’s lithographs (or “lithos”) were able to replace airbrush work on effects like the contours of the ground in some wonderful (and rare) tracking shots of Taran’s pig fleeing the Gwythaints (transferred directly to cel in diffused green from the animators’ crisp black drawings). Semi-transparent shadows are now possible on a single camera pass. If desired, the shadow can be given progressive diffusion as it extends from its light source, with not just the diffusion but the progression absolutely consistent from cel to cel (hence from frame to frame) by diffusing the image between the lens of the Levy camera and the surface of the cel.

Working in a basement of the Special Photographic Effects building that reeks of photographic and lithographic chemicals, Gagliano has rebuilt the studio’s Levy camera, built by Iwerks in 1939, to function with today’s materials to meet today’s needs. Once he began developing the technique, though, needs seemed to spring up out of the woodwork to meet his capabilities. “He surprises us time and time again,” remarks Barry Cook, animator of the Bauble and other Black Cauldron effects. “We go down there with some kind of problem like the Bauble, we don’t even know if it will work. He works with it, I work with the artwork, he shoots a test at different exposures, we see it on the creen, and there it is! Everybody just goes, ‘Man, how’d you do that?’”

“Usually you have a technical person and an artist, and you can never get them to come together,” echoes Don Paul. “Bernie’s a real good bridge between the two.”

“I can do reductions, or I can do blowups; sometimes a negative, sometimes a reversal; I can take it off a drawing or a painted cel,” Bernie explains. “I can change the negative with diffusion, or use it sharp line. We’ve also come up with a technique for controlling the diffusion so that it holds registration: we can have the soft-edge shadow hit a sharp registration line and stop, but stay diffused to that point. There are a number of things we’ve done in the film that they’ve never had before, that have this combination of photographic and animated effects with a consistent quality throughout. We’ve taken backlight litho and given it two other dimensions. They’ve always been high-con, sometimes with half-tone quality, but we’ve been able to create a whole range of gray scale they’ve never had. On top of that we have all these toplit elements: masks, shadows, Baubles and charcoal renderings.

Don Paul’s mini-Hindenburgs and the Horned King’s slitscan entrance are prime examples of the stamp these lithos have left on The Black Cauldron. They play a large part in creating the interplay of glisten and gloom that suffuses the entire picture and makes it the magical thing that it is. Many of the effects have always been possible in the abstract, but difficult to the point of unfeasibility in the real world; others could never have been achieved with this sense of authority any other way. The general impression they impart is not an overly technological one, or it would clash with the mood of the story; instead, the effect is of artwork extending outward into more dimensions than it usually reaches.

For the impact of Taran’s magic sword with the oafish ax of one of the Horned King’s vassals, effects animator Jeff Howard was able to get a diffused highlight on the vassal’s face on the same backlight mask with the sharply defined sparks coming out of the sword, being able to see a clear cel in the spark area without contrast so high it lost the detail of his artwork.

For reflections in pools of water, Bernie stretched the characters by making new reverse-direction cels with a tilted platen on the Levy camera, then restored the images to a normal size, while maintaining the elongated perspective, by tilting them back on a 4x5 view camera, mechanized for consistent exposures, and making prints from each of the photographed negatives, with registration marks, printed right along with the image.

To give dimension to the reflections of the Peraza vision being dappled onto the characters watching it, the backlight highlight lithos are photographed over a shadow mask cel, which holds the reflections back from those sections of the body less inclined toward the light source, and doubles as a shadow over the character on the first pass.

And when the “Cauldron-Borne” – the Horned King’s Zombie Army – rises up to take over the world, then loses a certain amount of steam due to interference in the Cauldron, they give rise to a succession of transparent after-images (inspired by the optically printed after-images in Norman McLaren’s short film Pas de Deux) – as many as 60 per Zombie at once, all made from the original animation drawings and each one fading slightly from its first appearance to its eventual disappearance, all printed onto a single litho, and not tinted green or diffused till they get to camera. Sixty after-images on a veritable sea of bodies, each fading slightly from one frame to the next, can be done on camera, but probably wouldn’t be.

Disney animators have the advantage of working at the one studio in the business with a sense of continuity – the only one in town with an archive. Hence a distortion glass carefully ground for Pinocchio makes possible The Black Cauldron’s vision scene. Some of the Cauldron’s fog is transferred to lithos from live-action film shot by Eustace Lycett thirty years ago for purely experimental reasons. The cloud tank footage that lights up the sky for the Horned King’s castle is all left over from Something Wicked This Way Comes. And Ub Iwerks’ Levy camera couldn’t do everything Gagliano trained it to do without retired Tron equipment.

But the archive can yield up some unscheduled suprises. “I saw all these charcoal drawings from Fantasia and Pinocchio in the morgue,” says Don Paul. “And I was saying, ‘God, they must have had a huge airbrush staff! And how did they follow through with everything – the airbrush people must have been animators, because nothing really flickers.’ There was that break: I couldn’t figure out how they got those drawings to film. Then I started finding some of the cels, which were lithos. And I couldn’t’ believe it. I’ve seen lithos of Monstro the Whale, and all the demons in Fantasia were photographic. We’ve re-done what they did in the 40s; we’ve taken it further, I think, because we’ve cleared the density much better now, and we’re holding a little more tone than they did. But they actually had a photographic reproduction of charcoal onto a film stock.”

Further research, outside the studio, turned up an explanation: the photographic technique had been a jealously guarded secret among a small corps of effects experts, who applied their magic to Fantasia and Pinocchio, but then got caught in a crossfire of wage and labor disputes, erupting in the major strike that crippled the studio in 1941. When they found themselves laid off, they guarded their secret even more jealously and stole away into the night with all records and notes of their process, never to be heard from again. The litho and APT techniques now in use at the studio had to be developed from scratch, as if the previous work had never been done.

“We feel that we’ve gone back to the standard that existed when Disney made his reputation, and we’ve done it under all kinds of handicaps,” Bernie points out; “Contemporary management under siege, a transition there we’ve had to deal with, no possibility of getting the equipment we really need, solving the problem anyway with a combination of the knowledge of the artist, the photographer, and things we can dig out of the archive, and the expertise that has come to us through the manufacturers, who give us products superior to products they did in the past.”

Even at Disney, it seems, probing into recent history has something of an archaeological atmosphere to it. Discovered in Ub Iwerks’ notebooks was the design for a machine to spray a fine lacquer onto frosted cels (textured to receive certain art elements, like pastels, that won’t register on normal, smooth-surfaced celluloids) to clear them up again for camera once the art has been applied. There is little awareness of frosted cels and their value at the studio today, and even less idea what to do with a machine designed to restore them to clarity. The Pinocchio distortion glass was actually something of a puzzle; nobody at Disney now really knows what it was used for in Pinocchio or why it was that it had survived the years in one piece, when natural selection had done in all its fellows. When it was, unfortunately, dropped and broken in the final month of Cauldron production, it was like breaking the Rosetta Stone.

Don Paul, fascinated by the rippling water distortion effect achieved in the Wishing Well scenes in Snow White, managed to find out that it was achieved with a hard lacquer layered and animated on its own cels, then photographed above the character’s image (her “reflection”) on the multi-plane camera. All attempts to re-create the formula for the lacquer failed to jell. The original chemist had to be located in Arizona and the recipe spilled out over the phone, but things still didn’t firm up properly until he was actually hired back by the studio on a temporary basis to help mix and layer the recalcitrant material. When it came time to apply it to the cels, the work was spread out among artists more evenly than the lacquer was spread on the cels, resulting in a jumpy effect in the first take of the scene. But it was already too late: the schedule didn’t allow for this time-consuming process to be attempted a second time, and a quicker method had to be devised to meet the deadline.

“I feel that the more times we settle for that kind of thing,” grumbles Ted Kirscey, the effects animator with the longest tenure at the studio, “the more times we take short cuts, the more times we try to use the speedier method – which turns out a long of times not to be the speedier method – the more times we do that, down the road, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, we’re not going to have a Disney animated film anymore.” Kirscey did some of the more conventional effects animation in The Black Cauldron, including the magnificent crumbling of the castle in the final reel, and he’s less than impressed by the encroachment of photographic techniques onto his turf: “I see two schools of thought here,” he says, “one is the type of person who’s very interested in live-action, Star Wars-type filmmaking, and the other is thinking of the art form that pervades here, the Disney animated film. Those two philosophies will not meet. If they do, it will destroy one or the other”…
https://imgur.com/a/PlwuJD2

(The caption for the first picture is "Four of the steps required to produce the scene at bottom. Top, the character cell. Next, a highlight cell with lighter values than the character model. Third, the bauble on a cell without diffusion. Fourth, the drybrush streak.")

(The caption for the third picture is "Top, original pencil drawing on paper. Center, shot of original art on fine grain litho using 300 line screen with diffusion added. Bottom, the composite with painted background.")

(The caption for the 4th picture is "Original charcoal rendering by Jeff Howard.")
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