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Rating: As a child, I wanted to become a wandering knight and loved watching trains. I counted the carriages hoping they would never end. When I visited my grandparents in Piedmont, my father would take me to the Avigliana station. It was manna. The highly cursed level crossing (which no longer exists today) barely had time to lift before a new intimidating announcement would lower it again for the passage, minus the local trains, of goods convoys headed to France via Turin. Some were so long they seemed like transported troops.
One year, for some obscure reason, it was decided to spend the summer holidays in a small town in the Cosenza area, Grisolia. It felt like being in my own village, except for the fact that the sea was a few kilometers further away. A beautiful but treacherous sea, where when you are sure of reaching the open water at a sumo pace, you sink into a pit trying to mimic the Mariana Trench.
Grisolia was not reached by a railway, and to satisfy my innocent amusements, one had to go to the abandoned station at Cirella or that of Diamante. The rail traffic was practically zero with a decimal or two after the point. With a bit of luck, you could occupy your fingers with Fiat's diesel coffee pot. The station was so deserted that I dared, with the advice and complicity of my father, to lay an ear on a rail, hot from the season, to sense the passage of a new convoy. If the rail vibrated, the train was coming. This was how the Indians planned their attacks.
Once boredom overflowed, my father opted for a nearby cinema. The only one in town. In the afternoon they screened cartoons for a few patrons. When I came out, just a step away from prime time, (which in the '80s was at 8:30 PM) there were rather long lines, in jeans and sponge socks for "Top Gun" or "Short Circuit".
"The Black Cauldron" managed at least to propose itself for the satisfaction of the other, of entertainment. The poster already promised well with swords, winged dragons, dark monsters, goblins, fairies, gloomy impregnable castles, and all that could tickle your imagination for a fantasy story with a medieval flavor. Wow! And then it was a Disney!
Taron is a young pig keeper who thinks the same way I do. I doubt he has any notion of the existence of railroads but he possesses Ewy, a piglet with supernatural gifts. Just a basin of water and a stick to stir it like a whirlpool, and from her snout immersed therein, dark prophecies appear. An evil king, Cornelius, wants to seize a black cauldron, capable, being magical, of resurrecting corpses. The terrible sovereign would use it to immerse the skeletal remains of his soldiers, many apparently, to create an army of skeletons to reign supreme over everything. But where is the astonishing pot? Only Ewy knows. The piglet will be kidnapped by Cornelius's modified pterodactyls, and Taron must sacrifice himself to bring her back home safe and sound before everything ends in disaster.
Taron will share the treacherous journey with a hungry little creature named Gurghy, Princess Ailin, and the storyteller equipped with a broken lyre, Sospirello. In the castle's dungeons, he will find a sword so prodigious it would make Durandal pale, and he will encounter a world populated with goblins and orc women (is that what you call a female orc?).
Directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich and shaped by a remarkable soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, absolutely adjacent to the setting and sequences, this film was not very successful as it was considered even too scary for a cartoon and thus declared "unsuitable" for children. Heresy.
The drawings greatly resemble the style of the classics directed by the trio Geronimi-Luske-Jackson although at the time I inevitably associated them with the worlds of Dragon's Lair where I must have poured mountains of five hundred lire coins. Far from the plots and hilarious figures of Wolfgang Reitherman, indeed everything distinctly frees itself from Disney's fairy tale canons, winking at that "Lord of the Rings" from almost two decades earlier, directed by Ralph Bakshi that wasn't so kind in terms of brutality. However, nothing that can make young rampant ones' sleep dramatic.
At that time, I was just over eight years old, and when leaving the cinema, I felt like Braccio da Montone. Taron and his cauldron still pass before my eyes in digital format. With sweet nostalgia.
I still like trains. Only now I endure them.
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