Cobbled To Pieces

June 23, 2020

Strap yourselves in guys cause this one is a real doozy! The Thief and the Cobbler is a movie that was made by a guy named Richard Williams. Never heard of it....well I'm not surprised. I didn't know this movie even existed until last year! Will get into why nobody really knows about it. Anyway, you probably haven't heard of Richard Williams either. Well he did the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

So are story begins in England where Richard Williams was working on a animated movie adaptation of the Stories of Mullah Nasrudin by Idries Shah which are stories from the Middle East. However, work stopped on it because the Shah family threatened to sue Dick for copyright. So that was scrapped. But one off the background characters they where able to keep. That character was the thief. And so, the Thief and the Cobbler was born and what followed was Twenty-Eight years of work! Yes, Twenty-Eight years of blood sweat and tears! This is the longest production off a movie ever! Why? Because Dick is a perfectionist. This was his passion project and his "reason for living!" He fired people all the time to. One time he fired a guy that was right on the doorstep! He wanted this movie to be the greatest animated movie of all time.

The movie also went through several titles such as, The Thief who Never Gave Up, The Cobbler and the Thief, Once, Your Mom is a Thief and Your Dad is a Cobbler, and The Thief touched the Cobblers Spaget. But they decided to go with the Thief and the Cobbler.

He Unfortunately wasn't able to secure funds from studios or investors. So Rick put the movie into his own hands and decided to finance it himself. He did this by doing commercials and stuff. But the project really kicked into high gear when Richard Williams signed up to do Who Framed Roger Rabbit as long as they would finance and distribute The Thief. Steven Spielberg (the producer of Roger Rabbit) promised he would and so Dick jumped on board. Roger Rabbit was a huge success and won Dick two Oscars for best visual effects and a special achievement for seamlessly combining live action and animation.

Because of this success, Warner Brothers made a deal with Dick to finance and distribute the movie. However, Dick was to much of a perfectionist to finish the movie by 1991 which is when it was supposed to be released and Warner's saw a work print off it and backed out. On top of that, Aladdin was coming out around the same time as the Thief and WB was worried because they where both a bit similar. In fact, animators that worked on Aladdin also worked on The Thief and the Cobbler!!! So Warner Brothers sold the film to the completion bond company and (As a representative of the financiers and lenders, a completion bond company will monitor production closely to ensure it is on schedule, staying within budget, and key crew members are operating effectively. They can also resolve any unforeseen issues with great efficiency, working with producers to get back on track) and fired Richard Williams! Miramax which was owned by Disney bought the rights and got Fred Calvert to finish it. They cut tons of stuff even destroying footage!!!

After all those years, the movie was finally released in 1995 by Miramax as Arabian Knights and...uh boy...it was a huge failure. Ironically, critics praised the parts that Dick Williams did but did not like any of the stuff that Fred did. It was even worse at the box office $669,276 with a budget of 28 million! So it didn't even make its money back. However in Australia, the movie was very close to the original, but they still had the songs and it was called the Princess and the Cobbler. They where now three different versions of the film, The Thief and the Cobbler, the Princess and the Cobbler, and Miramax's Arabian Knights.

Richard Williams did not like to talk about the movie and moved on to other projects. One time, Dick tried to make an official directors cut of the film with Disney's permission because they owned Miramax, but sadly that didn't go anywhere. They did have a special screening of a official directors cut a few years back screened by the academy of motion pictures arts and sciences. They also made a documentary of the film and I think this made it become a bit of a cult classic. Though the documentary may have had a unhappy ending, this story is not done yet.

A guy named Garret Gilchrist, a writer for CineMontage, The Editors Guild Magazine since 2008 and I think he wrote a she hulk comic. Anyway, he is also a huge fan of Richard Williams and made a recobbled cut of the movie in 2006 that was a big hit on YouTube. There have been over four mks of the recobbled cut with the most recent one coming out all the way back in 2013.

In conclusion, this is a very sad story, but I am so happy that it found new life on the internet. Some producer could properly release the workprint in theaters and then to DVD. I would love that!! But I don't think Richard Williams family wants that. For know, we only have the Recobbled cut, which actually has more stuff in it than the actual official workprint. So we are getting something better after all. Also, go watch the movie. Its AMAZING!!!! Its one of the greatest films ever made!! Even though Richard Williams never finished it, I think he succeeded at making one off the best animated films ever made.