The Digital Life of The Thief and the Cobbler: Fan-editing and Film Reconfiguration
The climactic sequence of The Thief and the Cobbler/The Princess and the Cobbler/Arabian Knight (unfinished, 1993, 1995, Richard Williams) or the ‘War Machine sequence’ - as it is commonly found on YouTube - is a long and intricate piece of experimental animation (Fig 1). The sequence resembles a surreal Rube Goldberg machine, or a piece of lithography made by Escher. As many kids growing up in the 90s, I watched the sequence (and the film) on VHS, and for most of my life I remembered it as if it was a fever dream. This spring I rediscovered The Thief and the Cobbler while browsing through YouTube. I learnt about the complicated production history of the film, its failure and most importantly its rebirth as The Recobbled Cut (2013), made possible by the video sharing platform and fan communities. The fan-edit version of the film, made with the assemblage of the original film sequences, restored workprints, storyboards, new animation, new sound effects and music, edited by animator Garret Gilchrist, has had four iterations so far, with a fifth one under way (ElectricDragon505, 2019). It is a fascinating viewing experience due to the disjunctures that the different types of animation sources generate. In this blog, I examine the important link between The Recobbled Cut and the flourishing of YouTube as a platform that facilitates audiences to access, reconfigure and disseminate media that would otherwise be adrift (Hilderbrand 2007, 50). As authors like Lucas Hilderbrand and Julie Levin Russo argue, the fan-edit/fan-video phenomenon is a transgressive appropriative form of media production that is able to deconstruct, critique and reconstruct cinema, television and popular culture, heavily engaging in intertextuality and blurring the lines between audiences and authors (Russo 2009, 126, 129). The Recobbled Cut presents the opportunity to think through different layers of the transgressive dimensions of fan-made media. Furthermore, observing the different sources of animation in The Recobbled Cut, which range from finalized animated sequences to reconstructed pencil tests, workprints, storyboards and in some cases new animation made by Gilchrist, is useful to understand the flexibility and capabilities of animation as an essentially transgressive medium, which is pertinent for YouTube as a platform that enables experimentation.
Fig 1. The Thief and The Cobbler’s Escher-esque War Machine.
The production of The Thief and the Cobbler (TAC) was complex since its inception. The longstanding passion project of animator Richard Williams, perhaps best known for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), the film started its development in the late 1960s. It was not until the 80s that it received financial backing and started its official production with Warner Bros. After failing to meet a deadline in 1991 the project was gradually taken from Williams’ command and placed into Fred Calvert’s hands, an animation director and producer best known for his work with Sesame Street (Joan Ganz Cooney & Lloyd Morrisett. 1969-) in its early days. Calvert’s version was then partially released in 1993 as The Princess and the Cobbler. Another version, Arabian Knight - which was recut as a ‘rip-off’ of Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker 1992) - was released by Miramax (at the time a subsidiary of Disney) in 1995. Consequently, the film’s extraordinary history generated a fascination among audiences in the early 2000s thanks to the internet and fan forums. In a 2019 interview created for YouTube, Gilchrist recounts how he was able to re-edit the film in 2006 because he met a person who worked on the film’s production via an online forum. After that first interaction, more people started to collaborate in the project by providing footage of the film (ElectricDragon505, 2019).
The most renowned feature of The Recobbled Cut is its ‘purity’ or the closeness to Williams’ idea of what TAC was supposed to look like (Fanedit.org, 2021). In this sense, it appears that the fan-edit diverges from other media created in the same format, since it is a matter of restoration and reconstruction, similar to A Moment in Time (Richard Williams, 2013), the Williams’ approved edit of the film preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Abrams 2019). However, it is important to challenge the notion of the film’s purity as both TAC and The Recobbled Cut have multiple iterations that circulate on the internet. Additionally, footage and sound are uneven and disruptive, the sources come from different places, including new animation and minor changes that have been included in the fan-edit “to make it feel more like a finished film” (ElectricDragon505, 2019). The reconfigurations of the film do not work to filter its previous imperfections. Rather, they reflect on the transformative process that goes into any piece of media, particularly in animation, which is a medium that requires multiple iterations and provides flexibility in the transformation of a project. Consequently, the result is much more extraordinary because it reveals the collaborations and transgressions that have been made to create The Recobbled Cut, effectively a new film. This transformative process indicates its status as a “cult phenomenon” (Gilchrist 2013). Furthermore, the mixture of inputs and sources, as well as the variety of accounts distributing the fan-edit both on YouTube and on the web at large, also complicates the notion of authorship of the film.
The Recobbled Cut’s existence as a result of fan-forums, internet bootlegging, and YouTube, works as a sort of microcosm of animated cinema. Both film and animation often require the collaboration and labour of many, despite the credit being attributed to an author, director, or studio. However, The Recobbled Cut is a clear expression of the blurring of the lines between audience and authors. This is due to its lack of attachment to one definite origin - some of the animation used in the film is either made by Gilchrist or used by the different releases of TAC, the use of different texts (particularly classical music), and the uploading and re-uploading of its different iterations on YouTube and other sites by different users. Indeed niche-audiences that prosper in forums and sites like Reddit inform the process in which many adult animation programmes are produced, and are able to appropriate and reconfigure their contents on platforms like YouTube (Mihailova 2019, 1021). The fact that TAC is a work of animation, in interaction with the booming of the internet and YouTube in the early 2000s, started to complicate the binary of fan and creator. Most importantly it offers an interesting, albeit limited, opportunity in terms of medium experimentation.
Fig 2 - Transition Sequence. Finished image of mountains.
Fig 3 - Transition Sequence, discoloured pencil test. Glitchy image.
Watching The Recobbled Cut is a challenging viewing experience. The aesthetics of the film move between the polished surreal sequences that Williams’ crew was able to finish and that Gilchrist was able to upgrade into 4K; still surreal but discoloured poorer quality animation; the countless storyboard images and workprint black and white scenes; and the glossy animation which Gilchrist himself has included. These discontinuous images suggest that The Recobbled Cut can be understood as an animation experiment. Despite its analogue origins, and the uploading, re-editing and the translating of the materials into digital form, the film often distorted, disjointed, and incomplete images ambiguously work to reveal the inner workings of the animation itself and to complicate or obscure the intended, unfinished sequences, a double effect of glitch aesthetics (Cameron 2017, 334). For instance, in a sequence dedicated to transition between the Golden City’s palace to the land of the One Eye - one of the villains of the story, the image is supposed to flow in its perspective, penetrating into dark mountains, woods, deserts and a sky full of vultures. However, the resulting animation is constantly disrupted and disfigured by grainy, discoloured, black and white pencil tests (Figs. 2 and 3). However, The Recobbled Cut’s incompleteness and unintentional glitchy aesthetics that seemingly establish the film as a difficult viewing experience do not necessarily represent an error. Rather, they infuse the film with a new life, more suited for its digital format, and offer an opportunity into the reading of the workprint images in a deeper, more intimate level.
TAC is a film that is often categorized as a failure in terms of its complex and tragic production history, its underperforming release(s), as well as a personal failure for Williams, who worked for several decades on this ambitious project. Despite the best intentions of Gilchrist and his many collaborators to restore the film to its purest or original form, the film’s incompleteness - reflected in The Recobbled Cut’s different iterations - are a significant component in its new, digital life, and its cult status. The unintended glitchiness and distortion of the animation in the fan-edit, the blurred authorship of the new iteration of the film, and its varied-source materials, offer an opportunity for further experimentation with the medium in platforms like YouTube. Indeed, in recent years reconfigurations of animated films and media that resonate with The Recobbled Cut have become popular on YouTube, like Shrek Retold (3GI, 2018), Sonic Rebuilt (3GI, 2020), or Monster Hunter The Movie, Re-Animated (NCHProductions, 2021). Additionally, The Recobbled Cut reflects the increasing relevance that fandom has acquired due to the internet’s community building capacity and its potential to inform and transform the films and programmes they are invested in, as the backlash to the recent Sonic Hedgehog made clear. After the passing of Richard Williams in August 2019, digital expressions of TAC, such as The Recobbled Cut in its different versions, mark a new reconfiguration, a new film, and an even more experimental life for the ambitious and extravagant project.
**Article published: February 11, 2022**
References
Abrams, Simon. 2019. “The Story of Richard Williams and His Unfinished Fairy Tale, The Thief and the Cobbler.” RogerEbert.com, August 20, 2019. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-story-of-richard-williams-and-his-unfinished-fairy-tale-the-thief-and-the-cobbler.
Cameron, Allan. 2017. “Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image.” In Indefinite Visions edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit, 334-352. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
ElectricDragon505. 2019. “AniMat Interviews Garrett Gilchrist (The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut),” July 19, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwHmcVOwfW0&t=652s&ab_channel=ElectricDragon505.
Fanedit.org. 2021. “Thief And The Cobbler, The Recobbled Cut,” September 2, 2021. https://ifdb.fanedit.org/the-thief-and-the-cobbler-recobbled-cut/
Gilchrist, Garrett. 2013. “The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut Mark 4.” Orangecow.com, February 12, 2013. http://orangecow.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=3.
Hilderbrand, Lucas. 2007. “Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.” Film Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall): 48-57.
Lee, Chris. 2020. “Beyond the Creepy Teeth: How Sonic the Hedgehog Saved Itself.” Vulture, February 14, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/the-sonic-the-hedgehog-controversy-and-redesign-explained.html.
Levin Russo, Julie. 2009. “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence.” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer): 125-130.
Mihailova, Mihaela. 2019. “Drawn (to) Independence: Female Showrunners in Contemporary American TV Animation.” Feminist Media Studies 19. no.7 (October): 1009-1025.
Biography
Juliana Varela completed her MA in Film Studies at King’s College London. Juliana is interested in the relationship between new viewing practices and animation, as well as the cultural and political potential of adult animation.
