In Williams's script, the climax was even longer and slightly different than in the workprint or final films: After the collapse of the War Machine, Zigzag, at Mighty One-Eye's goading, conjures a larger-than-life Oriental dragon which dwarfed even the War Machine , which is about to flatten Tack, who once again trusts on his tack to bring down the dragon, revealing it to be nothing more than an inflatable balloon filled with acrid fumes, which permeates the atmosphere and makes everyone cough, even Mighty One-Eye; That can still be heard in the workprint.
Enraged, Mighty One-Eye is going to kill a frightened Zigzag just before meeting his own doom the same one as in the workprint , but Zigzag is pursued by Tack, Yum Yum and the Brigands and hides from them just before inadvertently meeting his own doom also in the workprint.
Although there were some production designs of the scene with the Oriental dragon, it was never made, as it was found to be too difficult to animate. The film was not finished by the deadline that Warner imposed upon Williams; [22] the film had approximately 10 to 15 minutes of screen time to complete, which at Williams's rate was estimated to take "a tight six months" or longer. Seeing it as potential competition to Thief Template:'s commercial viability, television animation producer Fred Calvert was asked to do a detailed analysis of the production status in early This rough version of the film was shown to Warners, and not well received.
During the screening, the penultimate reel of the film was missing, which can't have helped matters. By September , Warner had lost confidence and backed out of the project.
Additionally, according to Richard Williams himself, the production had lost a source of funding when Japanese investors pulled out due to the recession following the Japanese asset price bubble. Garrett Gilchrist, the filmmaker who would later restore the film as The Recobbled Cut, was critical of this decision, citing it as an example of a trend at the time of animated films being tampered with by studio executives: "They didn't appreciate what they had with The Thief and the Cobbler.
They wanted something that could compete with Disney, and they had something which could compete with Disney, and they threw it away because they didn't get it". Sue Shakespeare of Creative Capers Entertainment had previously offered to solve story problems with Terry Gilliam and Williams, and proposed to allow Williams to finish the film under her supervision. However, her bid was rejected by Completion Bond in favour of a cheaper one by Fred Calvert.
Calvert, previously a producer of extremely low budget television animation, was not a fan of Williams or of the film. I took it as a way to try and preserve something and at least get the thing on the screen and let it be seen. Editor Harry Keramidas was hired to look at Williams's film and cut it down, over a period of about three weeks.
Fred Calvert's changes to the film were much more extreme. His version would be called "The Princess and the Cobbler," adding songs, rewriting all the dialogue, omitting vast amounts of footage and reducing the character of The Thief.
Calvert said later: "We hated to see of all this beautiful animation hit the cutting room floor, but that was the only way we could make a story out of it.
One of the problems, there were a number of these situations But what he animated on the screen was five minutes up and down that pipe which would ordinarily be five pages of script These were the kind of imbalances that were happening.
He [Richard Williams] was kind of Rube Goldberg -ing his way through. I don't think he was able to step back and look at the whole thing as a story. Some of the deleted Thief scenes were included as part of Calvert's end credits. Steve Lively recorded a voice and narration for the previously mute character of Tack, and several other characters that already had vocal tracks prepared for them were re-voiced.
Adult content was also toned down: In the scene where the dying messenger warns the king, the spike from the flagpole sticking out of his chest was removed. References to The King's sexual interest in a Maiden from Mombassa were also removed.
It took Calvert 18 months to finish the film. Some work was also done in Korea. Williams has never seen Calvert's versions of the film, saying "I'm not interested, but my son, who is also an animator, did tell me that if I ever want to jump off a bridge then I should take a look. Williams did not publicly discuss the film for twenty years after production shut down.
After the movie was completed, Allied Filmmakers, along with Majestic Films, reacquired the distribution rights from the Completion Bond Company. In December , Miramax Films , then a subsidiary of Disney —who had, of course, released Aladdin two years earlier—bought the rights in the U.
Until Miramax agreed to distribute the film, it was refused by many other American distributors. Tack and the Thief's dialogue was added over nearly every scene of the film; Williams' version had been largely dialogue-less. The character of the Old Witch was entirely removed save for a few lines of dialogue and ghost-like image , as was most of the climactic battle sequence which served as the film's centerpiece.
The first lines of Tack's narration now refer to "Aladdin and Ali Baba. Arabian Knight was quietly released by Miramax on 25 August On 4 October , Williams announced that a workprint of the film, subtitled "A Moment in Time", would be screened on 10 December in Los Angeles. After the screening he discussed the origins of the film and its production history. Williams acknowledged the role that Garrett Gilchrist's Recobbled Cut which he hasn't seen had played in rehabilitating the film's reputation.
The first time that the Miramax version of the film appeared on DVD was in Canada in as a giveaway promotion in packages of Kellogg's Froot Loops cereal. It came in a paper sleeve and had no special features, other than the choice of English or French language tracks.
The "Princess and the Cobbler" edit was released on a pan and scan DVD in Australia in by Magna Pacific , according to some sites; however, it is severely cropped, and additional features on the DVD are unknown. Although the information supplied to retailers such as Amazon. Although the film's executive producer Jake Eberts found that "It was significantly enhanced and changed by Miramax after Miramax stepped in and acquired the domestic [distribution] rights," [21] the Miramax version of the film was a commercial failure.
Alex Williams , son of the original director, criticised changes made by Calvert and Miramax, called the finished film "more or less unwatchable" and found it "hard [ In addition, the film won the Academy of Family Films Award.
The Secret of Kells , a animated film that based its style on traditional Irish art, had The Thief and the Cobbler as one of its main inspirations. In the words of Kells co-director Tomm Moore , "Some friends in college and I were inspired by Richard Williams's unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler and the Disney movie Mulan , which took indigenous traditional art as the starting point for a beautiful style of 2D animation.
I felt that something similar could be done with Irish art. Template:Citation needed. Several low-quality video copies of Richard Williams's workprint have been shared among animation fans and professionals. Disney his workprint of The Thief , which Disney liked. In , a filmmaker, artist, and fan of Williams's work named Garrett Gilchrist created a non-profit fan restoration of William's workprint, named The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut.
It was done in as high quality as possible by combining available sources, such as a heavily compressed file of Williams's workprint and better-quality footage from a Japanese widescreen DVD copy of Arabian Knight. This edit was much supported by numerous people who had worked on the film with the exception of Richard Williams himself, who initially wished not to have anything to do with the film , including Roy Naisbitt, Alex Williams, Andreas Wessel-Therhorn, Tony White, Holger Leihe, Simon Maddocks, Neil Boyle, and Steve Evangelatos, many of whom lent rare material for the project.
Some minor changes were made to "make it feel more like a finished film", like adding more music and replacing storyboards with some of Fred Calvert's animation.
Twitch Film called it "the best and most important 'fan edit' ever made". The Recobbled Cut has been revised several times with better-quality footage. The "Mark 3" version released in incorporated 21 minutes from a minute reel of rare 35mm film, saved from Jean MacCurdy 's trash at Warner Bros. The HD "Mark 4" version was released in September This version incorporated materials donated by animator Simon Maddocks, including a high quality PAL VHS of the original workprint, as well as rare pencil tests not seen in any previous version, including two VHS tapes made by Fred Calvert when he started production on The Princess and the Cobbler that contain shots not in the released version.
All video was filtered and improved by Christoph Nass. Over an hour of 35mm footage was transferred and restored in high definition, resulting in about 30 minutes of the film now being in full 35mm HD quality. All materials were restored frame by frame by Garrett Gilchrist during a period of over two years, including many special effects to get the material up to standard. Gilchrist described this as the most complex independent restoration of a film ever undertaken.
Original Thief animator Andreas Wessel-Therhorn was commissioned to draw new material for the hands at the beginning of the film. Persistence of Vision is a documentary by Kevin Schreck, about Richard Williams and the doomed production of The Thief and the Cobbler, which the film calls "the greatest animated film never made.
European Animated Films Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Recent blog posts Forum. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? The Thief and the Cobbler. Edit source History Talk 0. Retrieved 12 November Das neue Guinness Buch Film. Frankfurt , p , cited by J. Cancel Save.
As a result, Williams had a falling-out with the Shah family. Paramount withdrew a deal that they'd been negotiating. Williams was forced to abandon Nasrudin, as the Shah family took the rights of Williams' illustrations.
However the Shah family allowed Williams to keep characters he designed for the books and the movie, including a thief character that was Williams' favorite. Williams chose the complex, penultimate sequence of the Thief in the War Machine for the test.
Faisal, despite his positive impression of the finished scene, backed out of the production because of missed deadlines and budgetary overruns. In the s, Williams put together a minute sample reel of the Thief, which he showed to Milt Kahl, a friend and one of Williams' animation mentors, at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz even worked with Williams to attempt to get financing in the mids, although he left later during production. Allied's distribution and sales partner, Majestic Films, began promoting the film in industry trades, under the working title "Once Both characters were deleted, some of Grim Natwick's animation of the Witch had to be discarded, and Ken Harris' sequence of a Brigand dreaming of a Biblical temptress was also deleted.
Steven Spielberg saw the footage of the film and was impressed enough that he, along with film director Robert Zemeckis, asked Williams to direct the animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Williams agreed in order to get his film the financing it needed to get finished. When Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in , Williams won two Oscars for his animation and contributions to the visual effects. Although it ran over-budget before animation production began, the success of the film proved that Williams could work within a studio structure and turn out high-quality animation on time and within budget.
Disney and Spielberg told Williams that in return for doing Who Framed Roger Rabbit , they would help distribute his film. This plan, however, did not come to pass. Disney began to put its attention more on its own feature animation, while Spielberg instead opened a rival feature animation studio called "Amblimation. Williams' current wife, Imogen Sutton, suggested for him to finance the film with European backers, citing his appreciation of foreign films.
Richard insisted he could produce the film with a major studio. Williams and Warner Bros. Williams himself later stated, "In hindsight, we should have just gone to Europe, take another five years, made it on our own, and then go to a distributor and get people who find it as a novelty.
With the funding from Warner Bros. Williams scoured the art schools of Europe and Canada to find talented artists. It was at this point, with almost all of the original animators either dead or have long since moved on to other projects, that full-scale production on the film began, mostly with a new, younger team of animators, including Williams's own son Alexander Williams.
In a interview with Jerry Beck, Williams stated that he had two and a half hours of pencil tests for Thief and that he had not storyboarded the film as he found such a method too controlling. Vincent Price originally recorded his dialogue from to , a period of 6 years.
Williams recorded further dialogue with Price for the production, 16 years later, but Price's age and illness meant some lines remained unfinished. Williams had before experimented with shots animated by hand to move in three dimensions with characters, including several shots in Roger Rabbit's opening sequence.
With The Thief, Williams began planning several sequences to feature greater use of this animation technique, including Tack and the Thief's palace chase — which was achieved without computer-generated imagery.
According to rumors, Williams approached The Thief with a live-action point of view coming off of Roger Rabbit. Williams was creating extra footage and extending sequences to trim down later and that he would have edited down the workprint he later assembled.
Warner Bros. Williams, dedicated but pressured, was taking his time to ensure sequences would look perfect. This explains the part where One-Eye was killed by his female slaves is dropped due to the slave women took revenge on One-Eye for sexual assault. The American video version reinstates the original title of "The Thief and the Cobbler", but is in all other respects the edit released by Miramax under the title "Arabian Knight".
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