marcustitus-38018

Before I get into the actual review of the movie, I'm going to go over a summary of the backstory of this movie. In 1964, one of my favourite animators of all time Richard Williams, a Canadian animator living in the UK, began production on The Thief and the Cobbler. But obviously it wasn't originally called The Thief and the Cobbler; it went through many name changes such as The Amazing Nasrudin, The Majestic Fool and The Thief Who Never Gave Up. And even at the start of production, Richard wanted this to be his magnum opus and went on and on saying that this was going to be his masterpiece. Williams also hired to be on his team, in my opinion, some of the greatest animators who ever lived, such as Ken Harris, Grim Natwick and Emery Hawkins, and also hired popular actors such as Vincent Price to voice characters such as Zigzag. And since Richard wanted this movie to be his magnum opus, he wanted basically everything to be absolutely perfect, which ended up taking so much time. In fact, this film holds the record for the longest-running animated film in development, which is 29 years. Richard literally fired hundreds upon hundreds of animators because he wasn't satisfied with the way the animation looked or even the colour palette, and to call Richard a perfectionist would be a massive understatement. But then in 1989, there came a brief light of hope when Warner Bros agreed to distribute the film and it finally entered full production. Unfortunately, Williams and his team failed to reach the original 1991 deadline that WB gave him and on May 15th 1992, Williams and his animators were given the boot by Warner Bros and the film was sent off to the Completion Bond Company and was hastily finished by TV producer Fred Calvert and his team and was finally released on September 23rd 1993 in Australia and supposedly South Africa with the title The Princess and the Cobbler. And unfortunately, since Williams passed away in 2019, The Thief and the Cobbler will unfortunately and most likely never be finished. However, the closest we do have to an original version, besides the May 1992 workprint, is a non-profit fan restoration by filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist called the Recobbled Cut, which is the version of this movie I have watched and reviewed. And honestly, this review is going to be very short but I just want to say, if you have never seen this before and you're a big fan of animation and cartoons like me, you need to go and watch this movie at least once because the Recobbled Cut is actually up for free on YouTube.