The Movie: The Black Cauldron has been notorious for years for being the first Disney animated feature to get a PG rating. It's scarce availability in the home video market has been attributed to its dark content... the black sheep of the Disney film family. Well, The Black Cauldron is the black sheep alright, but not because of it's dark subject matter, but rather because it is just one really terrible, boring movie.

I guess the only thing it really has going for it is its very un-Disney-esque darkness, with lots of skulls and dragons and skeletons and evil witches and magical spells and all, but the plot was very weak overall, and the animation did not impress me a great deal. This film was straight out boring. Despite the fact that it was only 9PM by the time I finished this thing, I was ready to fall asleep. It took a lot of strength to not shut it off right in the middle.

And, as Cami pointed out, there seemed to be a lot of needless cackling and laughing going on, almost as if the filmmakers didn't know what else to have the characters do or say during the time period. Just an overall awful movie that I do not recommend to anyone, even people who just want to see it just to see what this whole fuss about the PG rating is about.

The DVD: Be thankful that this disc is almost impossible to find. Although it's labeled as "Gold Collection", there's nothing golden about this DVD at all. The video transfer was pretty bad, non-anamorphic widescreen, grainy, dirty, and with excessive edge enhancement processing that gave things a pixilated look, and only accentuated the graininess of the video.

Interestingly enough, one of the big selling points of this film was the fact that it was shot on 70mm -- but this DVD appears to have been made from one of the 35mm reduction prints, as it was the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of the 35mm prints, and not the 2.20:1 aspect ratio of the 70mm version. Certainly if they had used the original 70mm source the picture would not have been so grainy.

Another one of the big selling points of this film was its 6-channel surround sound. I don't know if the original was that bad, or if something a was lost in the conversion to Dolby Digital 5.1, but the sound quality was not only poor, the use of the surround channels was awful. Instead of using the 5 speakers to create one continuous soundscape, sounds would appear out of each speaker very deliberately, as if to yell out "THIS SOUND IS SUPPOSED TO COME FROM THIS DIRECTION", and every time it happened, I was distracted enough to be taken out of the world of the film (which admittedly, wasn't too difficult to do considering how poor the film was in the first place).

Special features include a trailer, and a lame DVD game. Oh yes, it also included a Donald Duck cartoon, titled "Trick or Treat" which proved to be far more entertaining than the feature itself. The video transfer was better on it too. Yes, this the black sheep not only of Disney films, but also of Disney DVDs, with a poor film, and a poor presentation of the film, such a contrast from the usual ultra-high quality we're used to seeing from Disney DVDs.