Advent Calendar: Day 18

By Circe -

The Thief and the Cobbler is an animated movie that has lain unfinished for over fifty years.

In 1964, an animated named Richard Williams was engaged to illustrate a collection of translated stories about Mulla Nasruddin. It inspired thoughts of an animated feature, combining elements of Nasruddin. By 1968, news of production was beginning to leak out.

And... chaos. Funding was difficult to come by; animation was slow. At one point, three hours of drawing had been done, but had not been arranged into a coherent plot. The translator of the book Williams had illustrated had been partially funding the project, but Williams had questions about the accounting, and when the author withdrew support, the rights to his translations of Nasruddin went with him. 

Voice actors came and went. Vincent Price was brought on as the villain. The new main character, a cobbler, was (mostly) mute. Studio funding was promised, withdrawn, promised again. Williams kept learning new animation tricks and re-drawing footage, and insisted on animating everything on ones, nearly unheard of in the industry. 

A(n almost) finished version was cut together for Warner Bros in 1992. Nobody liked it. Fred Calvert finished another version as a Disney-style musical in 1993; it was released and the North American rights bought by Miramax, who re-cut it yet again. Neither of these kept the original -- well, revised original -- title of The Thief and The Cobbler. 

Linked here is a fan recreation of one of Williams' original workprints. It does not do justice to the original idea, but the original idea was more of a meandering art process than a film.

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