The Thief and the Cobbler (AKA: Arabian Knight) (1993) - A poor attempt at Disney-fication while tearing apart an artist's vision

If I were to bring up the name Richard Williams to any of you, what would you know that name for? Richard Williams was a British-Canadian animator whose work is highly regarded by film critics and animation fans. He is most known for being the animation director of the 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but he has also done a 1971 adaptation of A Christmas Carol alongside Chuck Jones, directed and animated the 1977 Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, and did title animation for films like 1967's Casino Royale and 1975's The Return of the Pink Panther. In 1964, Richard Williams began production on what was to be his crowning achievement, the film would be released just shy of three decades later. Remember when I talked about Animal Crackers and its troubled history? The Thief and the Cobbler is a history lesson in and of itself, I do not have the time to go through the entire production of this movie, but in the end, the film was taken from Richard Williams and was re-edited and turned into something different. This is the version many people know of today, and it was released by Miramax Films. Was this movie worth the troubled production-no it wasn't... kinda sorta... let's take a look!

The plot follows a lowly cobbler named Tack in the city of Baghdad, who falls in love with the beautiful princess Yum-Yum, however, a thief steals three magical golden balls from the top of a tower, and thus plunges Baghdad into peril. The great wizard Zigzag offers to trade the balls for the princess' hand in marriage, but after the king refuses point blank, he offers them to the powerful villain King One-Eye, who lays siege upon the golden city. Tack and the princess must find a way to defeat One-Eye and save the city. Plotwise, the movie is mostly solid, it has some filler moments, some moments that drag on too long, but no real major plotholes. That being said you can see where the plot is going and which character is which and yeah, the large character dressed in black and voiced by Vincent Price is the bad guy? You don't say </sarcasm>. That being said, I can give this movie a solid B for plot, maybe an A- on a good day.

Characters are not the films strongest point, though these aren't the worst characters I've ever seen, Tack is your standard protagonist, humble, do what is right, brave, not very interesting, except that he has the worst narration I've seen in any movie yet, it never goes away and feels the need to explain everything going on in the film. To give some comparison, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, kept the narration silent during big emotional scenes, and The Muppet Christmas Carol got rid of the narrators during the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come segment, this movie does not do anything of the sort. The thief has an inner monologue that is Jonathan Winters trying to be the Robin Williams' Genie character, with the modern references and that stuff. It was charming with the Genie because it was Robin Williams and his energy is just the right level of enjoying to watch. Jonathan Winters is not as energetic, and his references come off less like Robin Williams ad libbing for comedy and more like Gex. Remember Gex? Really, none of the characters are that interesting, I'm struggling to think of one nice thing to say, the princess is bland, the villain gets no screen time, the wizard suffers from the Unicron problem of only being interesting because of the voice actor. The only character I find has anything really interesting to say is the King, who does have some moments that make him better than other father characters. Yeah, the characters were not very memorable in this movie.

The biggest problem with this film though is just how hard it tries to be a Disney movie. I know that Miramax was a subsidiary of Disney at this time, but they did distribute some other films like... Freddie as F.R.O.7... um... Bionicle: The Movie - Mask of Light?... Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys? Oh forget it. My point is that this movie fails the hardest when it does try to be a traditional Disney film. Especially in the songs category, oh goodness the songs in this movie were dreadful. They had bad lyrics and forgettable melodies, give Playmobil: The Movie some credit, that movie had one song I remembered. Not that the rest of the audio is anything special, the background music was mostly ignorable, and they at one point played a snippet of "Night on Bald Mountain", all I can say is... Rocko did the parody better.

The one thing I can praise this film for though is the animation. I mean, it is smooth, surreal and one of the trippiest visual rides I've seen since Yellow Submarine. Again, this is a case where simply explaining how good it is would do the film a disservice. In fact, the animation is so good, that I would almost recommend the film just for the animation alone. It is a very surreal and very visually pleasing style, lots of the camera work is smooth and flows with the scenes. In fact, I think the only problem I have with the animation is sometimes the editing does not work in the animations favor. There is one scene where the Thief is bouncing off of awnings, but instead of following him on every bounce the camera cuts to a new awning and only follows him on small occasions. It's kind of distracting how different the editing makes the scenes feel, and that isn't the only problem with the editing. They also removed a lot of scenes, including the end battle climax, and the villain One-Eye's demise, in fact the film does have quite a few editing issues, scenes that don't gel together, reused animation. Individually, it isn't frequent, but you do notice it when it happens.

I... don't know how to really rank this movie. On the one hand, no, it is not a very good movie. In fact it's rather bad, but the incredibly good animation really does make this film worth watching. I guess it is a good compromise since we'll never get to see Richard William's true vision for the film, since he passed away in 2019, so... wait... there is a way we can see a film closer to his true vision. Yeah, I remember now, some fans have pulled together some cut scenes, scraps of test animation and more to make a version that is closer to the version that Richard Williams was hoping for... so yeah, I guess because of this films uninteresting characters, bad attempts to ape Disney and some really poor editing choices, I guess this film really isn't worth watching in the first place. In fact, this film probably isn't worth the curiosity of checking out for the animation... Yeah, if you want to see the animation, check out the Recobbled Cut of the film, or even just watch some scenes on YouTube, you can probably find the Thief and Cobbler chase pretty easily, so... yeah, I'd recommend avoiding this film, check out the Recobbled Cut instead.