The Thief and the Cobbler/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Animation / Visual Effects of Awesome: Williams' original scenes are amazingly well animated. Not only is it technically excellent, but the characters also often move and act in very inventive ways: Of particular note is Zigzag's playing cards scene (animated by Williams himself), which has to be viewed frame-by-frame to catch all the subtleties. In fact, the art was so good that some parts of it, especially the War Machine, looked like animated CGI.
  • Complete Monster: Mighty King One-Eye in the original workprint and Recobbled Cut is a brutal warlord who introduces himself in the aftermath of a complete massacre of an army he and his army have defeated, forming a mountain of hundreds of corpses upon which One Eye announces his intent to bring the Golden City and all within to destruction. Regularly making a habit of abusing his personal harem and using them as living furniture, One Eye spitefully orders the treacherous wizard Zigzag thrown to his pet alligators even after Zigzag provides him with the means to invade the Golden City. One Eye is implied to make a regular habit out of mass slaughter and seeks to annihilate the Golden City purely as a show of his bloodthirsty might.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The recobbled cut features truly inspired use of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis to fill in silent sections of the original film. The one scene that really stands out is when the heroes leave for the desert (using Thomas Tallis).
  • Ear Worm
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: The thief stealing the film at the end, considering what happened to the film in Real Life.
    • Also, the film was finally released under the title "Princess and the Cobbler" in September 1993. A month later, Vincent Price passed away. So Zigzag's final line "For Zigzag then, this is....the end!" is kind of particularly disturbing.
  • Jerkass Woobie: The Thief, especially if you've seen the Recobbled cut where an old lady, a polo game, a self destructing war machine and even a bed THAT COMES ALIVE FOR NO REAL REASON tries to kill him.
  • Misblamed: Calvert, who really liked Williams animation and tried to keep as much of the original as he could, gets most of the flack for the shoddy animation, but the Completion Company forced him to finish Thief as cheaply as possible and had the movie outsourced twice. Then again, it was his decision to add dialogue where it wasn't needed.
    • Who was it that made Tack tan in the middle of the night? The cel painters.
  • Mondegreen: The little song from Zigzag's advisors announcing his presence in the original cut is hard to make out, leading to a lot of these.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The One Eye's War Machine, not to mention the One Eyes themselves. A huge, vicious, implacable army led by a bloodthirsty, monstrous tyrant who uses slaves as furniture and only wishes to destroy everything he sees, atop a vast, disturbing war machine. Imagine what would have happened if Tack hadn't been able to stop them...
    • Also the sounds that the golden balls make when bouncing around in the Recobbled Cut. They're like bells of doom from hell.
    • The Bandits are far too ugly to actually be 100% human.
  • Tastes Like Diabetes: The "Am I Feeling Love?" sequence.
  • They Just Didn't Care: After the movie was taken from Richard Williams' hands, it was passed on to Majestic Films International, who finished it in a manner befitting this trope. Then Miramax got a hold of it.
    • The Calvert animation... oy veh, the Calvert animation. Not only is it rarely on-model but if one studies closely there are a slew of errors (YumYum's feather disappearing and reappearing during the "She is More" sequence, Tack losing his nose for a frame or two as he says "when to a wall you find your back... A TACK!!!!", etc)
  • What the Hell Casting Agency: Arguably, Sean Connery as Tack near the end of the Recobbled Cut. Of course, this was Richard William's original intention, somewhat of a joke, since you wouldn't expect such a skinny guy to have such a deep and suave voice. Howecer, people who are more familiar with the versions by Steve Lively and Matthew Broderick tend to cringe at this.
  • What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made On Drugs?: The original version is probably the second trippiest animated film, after Yellow Submarine.
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