The Thief and the Cobbler (1993, Richard Williams) (Patreon)

56/100

Unique situation here. My first experience of a movie has sometimes been the "director's cut," rather than the version originally released and long considered standard. (Two examples off the top of my head: Das Boot and THX 1138.) On rare occasions, I've been shown a work very much in progress—most notably, my first viewing of Looper, a full year before it premiered, was missing so many visual effects that sometimes text would pop onscreen to inform you of what you weren't (yet) seeing. But I don't recall ever before opting to watch an unfinished workprint, supplemented by fan tinkering that endeavors to smooth over the roughest spots, and treating that variant as definitive. It's not ideal, honestly. The Thief and the Cobbler's "uncobbled cut Mark 5 work in progress" (Garrett Gilchrist's latest iteration) not only includes numerous stretches that were never fully animated, but also illustrates via absence what a crucial role professional sound mixing plays in the art of cinema. I've strived to be generous, in much the same way that I used to make allowances when a beat-up, faded print was projected at Film Forum or wherever (still need to see Danger: Diabolik: But Not So Insanely Fucking Pink), but it's probably safe to assume that my rating would be at least a little higher had Williams ever been able to complete the film as he intended. What we have is irretrievably compromised.

Yet still intermittently glorious. Back in 2000, my friend Chris showed what's probably The Thief and the Cobbler's most dazzling sequence—Tack pursuing the thief through the checkerboard palace—at his annual movie clip party, so I wasn't wholly unfamiliar with Williams' aesthetic. But I'd never have guessed just  how hard the first half of this film leans on geometrically abstract visual insanity. It's frequently impossible to tell what a particular array of shapes represents until you see a character interact with it in some way; Williams playfully yet ruthlessly exploits the inherent limitations of two-dimensional animation, turning them into strengths. (Indeed, he transforms them into a kind of 3-D.) Every background is a playground, which is why it feels exactly right that both title characters are essentially silent clowns, defined by their movements in "space." To have them incessantly chatter/mutter through these giddy explorations of axes and vertices, as Miramax apparently demanded, is to render them drab and ordinary—I looked at a few minutes of Arabian Knight, out of curiosity, and recoiled in psychic pain. Up to a point, the clashing character designs likewise seem inspired: Zigzag and Princess Yum Yum are pure Disney (though they resemble Disney templates that hadn't yet been firmly established when this project commenced, which hmmm...), whereas Tack has more of a Max Fleischer feel and the thief somehow looks distinctly Canadian-drawn to my eyes. Since they all have different functions—the Disney-style characters carry the plot, while Tack and the thief exude naïve virtue and craven vice, respectively—it's fitting that they appear to have originated in different movies. 

What tempers my admiration is how much The Thief and the Cobbler actually comes across as half a dozen different movies, in a way that I doubt would have worked any better for me had Williams been afforded unlimited time and funds. While the thief's antics unquestionably influence the narrative, his scenes nonetheless feel strangely orthogonal to everything else, as if the screenplay had been built around a bunch of pre-existing shorts featuring that character. I was mightily confused when the brigands suddenly showed up, and no less confused when they wound up being almost totally irrelevant. Grimaced through the entire witch sequence, which is predicated upon elderly = saggy = laff riot. (The tower of hands where she resides is impressive, though.) Frankly, very little of the film's latter half, after most everyone leaves the Golden City, wowed me much; I can appreciate the war-machine setpiece's remarkable ambition, but it's busy and assaultive to a degree that left me cold (and also somehow reminded me of the Nazi imagery in Bakshi's Wizards). The thief's final ah-fuck-it gesture ends things on a high note, and certainly there's more than enough eye-popping animation throughout to justify this film's status as the Masterpiece That Wasn't. Deep down, though, I feel like there's a reason it never quite came together.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: According to my self-invented/-imposed rule, which privileges the U.S. release title unless I decide that it's been superseded (by a Criterion release under the original foreign-language title, say), I should really log this film as Arabian Knight [Thief and the Cobbler version]. That's what I did, for example, with Welles' Mr. Arkadin, to which "[Confidential Report cut]" is appended in my 2004 log. And yet I feel, despite not having seen more than a few minutes of Arabian Knight, that it diverges so egregiously far from its source, what with the silent characters who now never shut up and the songs and the copious non-Williams footage, as to become a distinct entity. What's more, Wikipedia places all of its info under The Thief and the Cobbler, with no separate entry for Arabian Knight, positing the latter as a variant of the former. So I'd rather simplify. This way, you know at a glance which version I watched. 

(Now, if I were to watch Arabian Knight, would I actually treat it as a separate film from Thief and the Cobbler? Probably not. So there's some special pleading going on here. But I can avoid that potential problem by averting my eyes. Please don't get me started on La Belle Noiseuse and Divertimento, both of which I have seen; that's a truly tedious philosophical can of worms.)