It is the first Disney animated feature to have absolutely no singing; thus, there is one less element available to alleviate the movie's dark elements.
It is the final Disney animated feature fully made and produced in the original animation building where Walt Disney had his office. The movie's production, along with Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Frank Wells moving into offices in the animation building, renovating the building that replaced Walt's linoleum floors with Berber carpeting, and bringing along major Hollywood movie stars, resulted in Disney Animation being moved into a series of warehouses in Glendale, just north of where Katzenberg's DreamWorks Animation would be built. They would remain in those warehouses until 1995, and the majority of the Renaissance films were made in Glendale.
This movie is the reason that the Disney Animated Canon exists. Prior to 1985 the Disney animated film lineup was more or less free-floating, with the 1940s package films sometimes being counted, the live action/animation hybrid films sometimes being counted, the documentaries with animated segments sometimes being counted, etc. This films release however was intended to be a landmark for Disney animation, and necessitated a label that was fitting for such an event; and so, shortly before Cauldron's release Disney finally set an official lineup for their animated movies in order to name this one their 25th feature (this led to Dumbo being retroactively added to the canon as entry #4 and got it repackaged under the Walt Disney Classics brand on home video, alongside Alice In Wonderland the following year.).
A common misconception is that The Great Mouse Detective was the first animated Disney movie to use CGI. Actually, it was this movie - the Bauble, boat, explosions, and cauldron itself were animated with CGI. However, because The Black Cauldron was such a failure, most fans and critical Disney historians purposely forget this vital piece of trivia.
Despite being a massive flop, it had gotten praise from probably the last person you'd expect - the writer of the original books, Lloyd Alexander. He stated: "First, I have to say, there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself, purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it, but I'd also hope that they'd actually read the book."
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