At the dawn of the 1990s, a decade of success for the animation studio, this very dark film, telling the story of a young farmer, experienced a resounding failure in theaters which could have cost Disney dearly .
“Every day when I walked through the studio door, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to come back tomorrow?’ My fear is being part of the generation that sank Disney Studios.” In the mid-1980s, times were difficult for the legendary studio, which is now celebrating its 100th anniversary, says American animator David Pruiksma. Box office at half-mast, outdated model, line deficits, creativity put in the locker room… Behind their drawing tables, we hear the animators humming the tune of the Christmas carol from the latest TV movie with Mickey: the sarcastic What a Lousey Christmas Day, Disney’s future looks so graya depressed ditty about a sacrificed budget, a sinking boat, the elimination of parking spaces or the end of eye stamps in the postal service.
At that time, the Disney animation studio was immersed in formalin since Walt’s death in 1966. “The first time I walked in, in 1981, I felt like I had traveled back in timedescribes David Pruiksma. It felt like we were in the 1950s.” Computers ? Don’t even think about it. To see their preparatory drawings come to life, the animators are forced to lift the sheets of paper by hand one by one. “Otherwise, we asked a service which photographed them, put them on film, and we could view them… three days later.” An archaic mode of operation, without a script for feature films but just a storyboard sketched as it goes, directors who share the scenes and reshape them as they go along and no pressure for the result.
For Uncle Walt, money is a secondary concept: Bambi was profitable only after two decades, Fantasy after thirty years. And this is not the latest project, Taram and the Magic Cauldron the story of a young farmer pitted against a dark lord coveting the powers of the subject of the title, who will set things right. On the contrary. It is rumored that this ill-conceived project at 44 million dollars, a record budget for the time, will be the final nail on the coffin of Mickey and others.
Hey ho, hey ho, they don’t have a job anymore
Taram and the Magic Cauldron was started in the mid-1970s, after Disney purchased the rights to a fantasy saga, The Chronicles of Prydain, five volumes long, to be condensed in 1h30. The stakes are high for the studio which hopes to win back the teenage audience who have been fleeing it for years. “Disney was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time.supports Didier Ghez, studio historian. The films he produced no longer corresponded to the market of the time. The company is on the verge of being bought by Wall Street financiers and then being resold piecemeal.” To counter this maneuver, two big names from Paramount were poached in 1984: Michael Eisner – who by his own admission has only seen one animated film in his entire life, Pinocchio – and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
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Clash of cultures between these two wolves of Hollywood and the cushy operation of Disney, where according to James B. Stewart in the book The Enchanted Kingdommany animators only clock in at the office for half a day before heading off to the employed masseur through the studio. “Soon after their arrival, Eisner and Katzenberg held a welcoming ceremonyremembers David Pruiksma. I didn’t really feel it, I didn’t go for it, and I did well. It was a Friday. On Monday, lots of people who were there started to receive dismissal notices. They outsourced entire services, and some were kicked out like that, after 40 years in the house…”
Katzenberg shakes up the habits of animators by giving them this famous phrase: “You’re going to have to work on Sunday too if you want to work on Saturday too!” The first meeting of the creatives is thus scheduled by their new boss on a Sunday morning at 7 a.m. The first viewing of the rushes of the film, which had been in the works for ten years, received a frosty reception. “Katzenberg asked to see the cut scenes… which clearly shows that he knew nothing about animation, where you don’t do one shot too many”describes Sébastien Durand, Disney specialist.
Anything but a blue dream
Taram and the Magic Cauldron, it is the story of a predictable industrial accident. Ten years of gestation, major departures from the studio, a record strike in 1982, the gradual retirement of the “Nine old men”, Walt Disney’s inner circle… “As a result, it was the second knives who found themselves in charge of Taram, squeaks Randy Cartwright, ten years in the box at the time. They had no vision, no charisma and little talent, to the point of becoming paranoid against the young guard of animators.” A not entirely unjustified distrust: “They were quietly made fun of during the dailies [le visionnage des séquences animées du jour]slips David Pruiksma, one of the young guns of the time. We thought we knew everything about everything back then.”
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This is where Roy E. Disney comes into play, the one who carries around the nickname “idiot nephew” that his uncle Walt once gave him. With his thin mustache and his striking resemblance to the patriarch, the role of guardian of the temple is ideal for him. Invincible, Roy Disney staunchly defends the animation studio. “He described his strategy to me at the time: ‘I choose my battles’recalls Sébastien Durand. ‘Save the studio, I could do it, but not Taram.‘His fate was already sealed.”
Roy E. Disney let Katzenberg cut the darkest scenes from the film, hastily added humor, postponed the release of the film by six months, without managing to prevent the film from being classified as PG-13 (parental consent recommended) , a first for a Disney. The film, released in the summer of 1985, cost the enormous sum of 44 million dollars, and did not recover half of that in theaters. He even gets atomized by the Care Bearsproduct cheap subcontracted to Taiwanese and Korean studios.
One of Disney’s executives at the time, Ollie Johnston, did not budge: “The new management never believed it. It’s terriblehe rages in an interview with the Norwegian specialist site Norskanimasjon. The movie could have been as good as Snow White.” During the test screening, many parents leave before the end, their crying toddler under their arm. “We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it wasn’t: ‘I can’t wait to go to McDonald’s and eat a Happy Meal bearing the image of these friendly living dead'”quips host Mike Peraza on his blog.
It takes (very) little to be happy
The punishment falls. The animators are asked to clear out their offices in Burbank, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which they have occupied since 1941, in favor of an army of white-collar workers more focused on handling numbers than paintbrushes. The new Glendale site is only a few kilometers away, but sounds like exile for David Pruiksma: “We found ourselves in the depths of a rotten suburb, in a warehouse without air conditioning that dated from the post-war period.” Undersized too. “I worked on The little Mermaid in a caravan”recalls his colleague Ruben Procopio. “Well, a Hollywood-style trailer, quite spacious. But at the time, the signal was clear. You are no longer the priority.”
While Taram rushes towards the precipice, Roy Disney pushed forward the following project at a forced pace and at low cost, Basil Private detective, which will be released in 1987. “We presented the project to management as if it were something new even though we had been working on it for a year and a half”, tells director Ron Clements to the American site Collider. First reaction from the Eisner-Katzenberg duo: “Damn, it’s going to cost us another arm and a leg, we’re not going to be fooled twice.”
What follows is a course of austerity which will not have escaped the attentive spectator. “It feels like BasilIt is cheap“agrees Jessie Duvot, cinema columnist on YouTube, who devoted a long video to Taram and the Magic Cauldron. We see that many of the cels were made with a photocopier rather than by hand.” Sold with the reassuring slogan of “Brand new! Really reassuring” to set it apart from its predecessor, it was a success with 25 million dollars in revenue for a 14 million budget.
According to the official historiography of Disney, the renaissance only began with The little Mermaidin 1991. We could date it precisely from the day Katzenberg hired lyricist Howard Ashman, who would infuse the recipes for Broadway musicals. “A song must arrive quickly at the beginning which reveals the universe, like History of life In The Lion King, details Jessie Duvot. Then, a piece in which the main character must detail his quest (I would already be king for Simba). Finally, in the last third, reduce the proportion of songs in favor of action. And it works like that, until Snow Queen Or Encanto !” It was not until 1994 that the animators were reinstated in a brand new building in Burbank, wearing Mickey’s sorcerer’s apprentice hat in Fantasy. A sign that the magic is working again.