Is the movie that almost killed Disney animation really that bad?
In 1985, a single movie almost killed Disney animation. With an announced budget of $25 million—later accounts place it closer to $40 million—The Black Cauldron was at the time the most expensive animated film ever made. Based on Lloyd Alexander’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, Cauldron’s scary villain and dark themes earned it Disney animation’s first-ever PG rating. In its opening weekend it made only $4 million at the box office, good for fourth place—behind an E.T. re-release, the month-old Back to the Future, and, at No. 1, National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Its final domestic gross was just over $21 million. Recognized by animation fans as the nadir of Disney’s post-Walt dark days, The Black Cauldron’s flop marked the end of the studio’s old way of making animated features. A new regime, led by Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, did away with the robust budgets and production schedules that had allowed, for example, animators to airbrush every single cel of Pino
