a review of 黑神锅传奇

FLOPUARY #10 Another nice surprise revisiting this one after having last seen it on its original release. The animation is much nicer than I remembered at this point in Disney's slump years, with some excellently gruesome character work for the villains and very good background and scenic design. Having said that, it's clear that this could have been a much more epic story than what made it into the slim 80-minute runtime, although there's plenty of images and concepts packed in that I remember first stirring an interest in fantasy when I was very young. It's a pity that epic fantasy franchises were such an recurring non-starter in the '80s, with one semi-ambitious movie after another trying its darnedest to make heroic swords-and-sorcery catch on during the lean years between STAR WARS trilogies. If there had been even one mainstream fantasy movie released during my childhood that was on vaguely the same level as Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS, I definitely would have gotten into fantasy stuff a lot sooner.