The Thief and the Cobbler (1993)

There's a particular kind of sadness that comes with watching a film and knowing, almost every few minutes, that what you're seeing isn't the film it was supposed to be. That's the experience of sitting through the Miramax cut of The Thief and the Cobbler. Not just disappointment. Grief, almost. Because beneath the botched editing, the awkward voiceovers and the slapped-on musical numbers, you can still see the bones of something genuinely extraordinary.

Richard Williams spent the better part of three decades working on this thing by hand. Three decades. And then it was taken from him, hacked apart, stuffed with forgettable songs and clumsy filler, and released as a would-be competitor to the Disney formula. The result is one of animation's most notorious disasters, not because the film is bad in the way bad films usually are, but because it's haunted. You're watching a ghost.

What survives of Williams' vision is, genuinely, breathtaking. The art style is unlike anything else in Western animation: richly detailed, geometrically precise, soaked in Persian and Middle Eastern influences that feel specific and alive rather than vaguely exotic. Backgrounds that look like illuminated manuscripts brought to motion. Character designs that are angular and strange in all the right ways. And then there are the sequences of pure visual storytelling, wordless stretches of chase and comic timing that owe more to Buster Keaton and Chaplin than to anything Disney was doing. In those moments, you see exactly what Williams was after, and it's extraordinary.

Then a song kicks in, and the spell breaks completely. The musical numbers don't just fail to land, they feel like they were assembled in a different building by people who hadn't watched the surrounding footage. Awkward lyrics, anonymous tunes, staging that grinds the film's peculiar visual rhythm to a halt. Whoever signed off on these clearly thought they were making the film more commercial. They just made it more incoherent.

And incoherent is the word. Characters materialise and evaporate without explanation. Motivations shift between scenes. The central conflict never builds any real emotional weight because the connective tissue holding it all together was clearly cut or simply never completed. The titular Cobbler, the supposed heart of the story, barely registers as a character at all. His silence, which in Williams' hands was presumably a source of Chaplinesque charm, here just reads as absence. You wait for him to mean something, and he never quite does.

I reviewed a Disney production from just a few years later that at least had the conviction of its own commercial instincts. Whatever its compromises, it committed to them. The Thief and the Cobbler in this form doesn't know what it wants to be, and that uncertainty poisons almost every scene. It's not willing to be the strange, silent, formally ambitious film Williams was making, but it's also not capable of being the crowd-pleasing musical it's been reshaped into. It falls awkwardly between the two.

There are people who love this film despite all of that, and I understand why. The animation alone earns a kind of devotion. Some of the elaborate set pieces, a rolling siege engine of extraordinary mechanical complexity, sequences where the frame is simply overwhelming in its detail and movement, these are the work of someone with a genuine and obsessive artistic vision. You can't fake that. No amount of corporate repackaging can fully smother it.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I told you this version of the film was worth your time as a coherent piece of storytelling. It isn't. It's a fascinating wreck, admirable in its ambition and heartbreaking in its execution. Two and a half stars feels about right: generous enough to honour what's genuinely there, honest enough to acknowledge how thoroughly it's been undermined.

Watch it once, absolutely. Watch it for the animation, for the glimpses of something that could have been one of the great achievements in the form. But if you want the closest thing to Williams' actual vision, seek out the reconstruction efforts that have done their best to restore it. The Miramax cut is the ruins. The recobbled version is at least a better guess at the cathedral.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1993  | Watched: 2026-04-20

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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