Hell Yeah, Prydain!

So you originally worked on The Black Cauldron?

Yes, we were developing character designs and different things. We were trying to push it, to make it go and explore horizons that Disney was not willing to stretch to yet. Tim was a very frustrated guy at that point.

Can you tell me about this work on The Black Cauldron that you did?

John Musker was working on a sequence which was in the witches house. He was designing it so that all the backgrounds were optical illusions like M.C. Escher.

Now, Tim was doing these character designs, a lot like Nightmare Before Christmas type characters. At what point he designed the gwythaints. The gwythaints were like pterodactyls, which is what they look like in the film now, pterodactyls. But Tim designed them so that their heads were really hands and he put their eye right there between the thumb and the forefinger. So they looked like, you know, when you make little silhouette figures on the wall. These things would come flying at you, but then could also grab and they had a snake-like tail and wings. Wild, great ideas!

The Horned King was more of a psychotic, schizoid guy. You heard his two different personalities by puppets. He would have these two different puppets and he was a ventriloquist. One puppet would say... like if he was considering killing somebody, one puppet that was like a psycho clown would say (loud, crazy voice): "Get him! Get him! Yes! Yes! Get his head off! Get his head off!" and the other head puppet would go (soft, squeaking voice): "No! No! let him live! let him live!". The Horned King was just a completely twisted, bizarre character. Now, he is just what we call the Evil Bonehead (laughter).

What were the scenes that you worked on?

I was doing some animation of fairies. I designed a lot of different characters on the thing. I did some animation of Gurgi, Eilonwy and did some experimental animation on them. This is a scene of Eilonwy, where she is picking things out of Gurgi's hair. She is talking.

I loved the voice of this character. I came upon a whole different kind of design on her, but the director did not want something that was so cartoony. Everything I did was being thrown out. They just did not like anything I was doing. Eventually the directors asked me if I would just leave the film and go do something different.

So I did Mickey's Xmas Carol. I worked on the Giant. Ron [Clements] And John [Musker] were also being kicked out of the film and they went to work on The Great Mouse Detective.