Maunderlust

Today I just stumbled across a pretty remarkable bit of animation called The Thief and the Cobbler. Apparently it was released in some form or another in 1993, but the cut wasn’t very good.

It feels like a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin movie set against works of art like Gustav Klimt’s the Kiss, or an Escher drawing. The movie includes some great sequences that hearken back to Popeye cartoons like Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp, and Ali Baba’s 40 Thieves. You’ll probably recognize some of the character designs and plot points from Disney’s Aladdin, which this film inspired.

Vincent Price delivers a wonderfully playful performance as an evil Vizier. And though the Thief and the Cobbler are silent, both convey a great deal of character and emotion through their body language and great facial expressions.

The movie is delightfully anachronistic. It recalls a time when animation captured the joy of movement, and payed off on fantastically choreographed physical comedy. If you’re a fan of the very early stuff from Disney, Warner Brothers, and Max Fleischer, you’ll definitely get a kick out of it.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see a completed version of this cut. But thanks to Garrett Gilchrist’s fan restoration, we can all enjoy this remarkable piece of animation history.

Links you might like:

• Max Fleischer Cartoons - Freely downloadable from Archive.org
• Vintage Toon Cast - A video podcast featuring classic cartoons.
• ReFrederator - More classic cartoons via Channel Frederator

[tags]The Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams, YouTube, Animation, Restoration[/tags]