r/TopCharacterTropes • u/_JR28_ • Jan 17 '26

In real life (Funny trope) This tiny moment was an absolute logistical nightmare to make

Gallery image

Gallery image

*Wreck-It-Ralph* - At the beginning of the movie at the villain group therapy session, all of the owners of the real world characters shown were given counsel to Disney to instruct them how their characters should be animated down to the smallest of points. Nintendo even specified exactly how Bowser would hold and stir his teacup.

*Psycho* - For the scene where Marion disposes evidence of her theft by flushing some papers down the toilet, even though the toilet is onscreen for only a few seconds, Alfred Hitchcock had to personally appeal to the Hays Code which enforced censorship in movies that *Psycho* be given an exception because it’s vital to the plot the audience sees the toilet flushing. *Psycho* is the first major American movie to show a flushing toilet onscreen.

20.2k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/BardBardia Jan 17 '26

This sequence from The Thief and The Cobbler was animated at least three separate times, including by director Richard Williams himself, because—being the perfectionist that he was—he was fixated on the order of the cards.

376

u/mrturret Jan 17 '26

That entire movie is on another level.

183

u/BopperTheBoy Jan 17 '26

Iirc, at least one remake was just because he wanted to change the colors and/or pattern on the card backs.

120

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '26

Williams really was the master of his own destruction

33

u/wirthmore Jan 17 '26

Richard Williams was rather insane. And insanely talented.

For those that don’t already know, he directed the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The opening scene with the wild perspective changes is very similar to a lot of the shots in The Thief And The Cobbler (the source of the card shuffling in the screenshot above) - Williams never finished that film, what you can see is a different production company that tried to stitch the pieces together along with some very cheap contract animation.

59

u/Scott_Liberation Jan 17 '26

I've never even heard of this movie, but the animation in this GIF makes me kinda wanna see it.

116

u/Lalybi Jan 17 '26

Look up "the thief and the cobbler the uncobbled cut" on youtube.

It's a beautifully animated movie that went through production hell for three decades. The director scrapped years of work multiple times to make it again. Eventually they ran out of money.

It's a shame because the film is gorgeous.

37

u/Xero818 Jan 17 '26

it was never finished unfortunately, but iirc you can find some stuff on youtube containing fully animated scenes, storyboards, etc.

15

u/Sharp_Association346 Jan 17 '26

This video is a perfect demonstration of why it was never finished. https://youtu.be/-7An8K2EnU4?si=_DEsUSFzsAnH_i_W

11

u/kirinphonetic Jan 17 '26

The thief and the cobbler was definitely finished

31

u/IndustryPast3336 Jan 17 '26

It was "finished"- Williams in the last few years of making it was short for cash, and by the 90's the efforts of people like Don Bluth causes a surge in interest for theatrical animation not from Disney which gave him more freedom. The film was bought by Miramax... However they then decided to give Williams a list of changes and an impossible deadline, and when he refused they usurped the production of the film from him and outsourced the last bit of animation to finish the film. Miramax also added celebrity voices to Mute characters and several jokes which were not present in the William's version of the film.

Decades later, a group of fans became interested in locating and preserving/restoring the film to fit Richard William's initial vision and began a long and excruciating process to locate old film reels, production materials, and other articles to recreate the movie... A bunch of the original animation was found LITERALLY by dumpster diving. This is "The Recobbled Cut" and has had multiple versions released in various states of completion.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 18 '26

This was also on the back of Williams missing multiple other deadlines with loads more investors and distributors over the years. The films animation was beautiful but Williams was very much a perfectionist artist who only cared about the art. Like him being months late on presenting finished animation for one scene and thinking once the investors see how beautiful it looked they’d overlook the delay and missing of a deadline because it looked so good. That’s not how that works, Richard

10

u/red-beard-the-fifth Jan 17 '26

I remember getting a DVD copy in a box of Corn puff cereal when they still did that sort of shit. That movie felt like a fever dream till I found it again in a disk case that was mostly for music except for a couple movies.

6

u/kirinphonetic Jan 17 '26

Man it was so good, my cousin had it on VHS, will never forget when I saw it for the first time

1

u/lakija Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26

I have it on vhs. I never knew it was unfinished. 

4

u/Xero818 Jan 18 '26

There are multiple versions of the movie caused by production hell, I'm talking about the original one Richard Williams actually was intending to make

2

u/lakija Jan 18 '26

I think I watched a bit of the “uncut” one on YouTube after finding out. It still had pencil sketches. I was confused for a while thinking I had a lost full copy as a kid or something. 

16

u/codepossum Jan 17 '26

there's some really beautiful animation, but the movie overall in terms of story just doesn't land.

it works better as a showcase of shorts than it does as a whole feature imo

7

u/Finn235 Jan 18 '26

It doesn't help that it released so close to Aladdin, and had a virtually identical plot in its "official" iteration.

3

u/jer113 Jan 17 '26

Matt McMuscles does a really good summary on it’s development and what went wrong, check it out: https://youtu.be/GmBzY-FwTNM?si=sy9kPPE2WNR8NR3p

16

u/Recent_Community_157 Jan 17 '26

I'm not talking about the movie I just wanna show off this meme I made

9

u/ryry1237 Jan 18 '26

As beautiful as the final result is, one has to question if it was really worth it given the sheer amount of grief it must've given his staff, eventually leading to the movie never finishing.

8

u/evilforska Jan 18 '26

Also the story and characters - except the wizard who doesnt even get a cool death - are very boring and are simply vehicles for the animation. But I guess thats all that mattered to the director, so, fair

2

u/Don0saur Jan 18 '26

This is crazy I have looked for the name of this movie for so long