The Thief and the Cobbler: How An Animation Legend’s Legacy Was Ripped Away by Miramax

Chances are, you don’t remember the 1995 animated film Arabian Knight. It was released by Miramax to bad reviews and quickly disappeared from theaters. Reviews called it an obvious rip-off of Aladdin, Disney’s own cherished take on the One Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights stories. The studio quickly forgot about it, and history almost did too. But the real Arabian Knight couldn’t be hidden, for the movie that (very few) people saw was a bastardized take on what was meant to be an all-time classic, created by one of the true geniuses of hand-drawn animation.

When Richard Williams died in 2019 at the age of 86, the animator was described as “a half-hidden master” of his field. Among professionals and fans of the medium, Williams was one of the true greats. His meticulous attention to detail and uncanny recreation of real-life movement was evident in every frame, from the opening credits to two Pink Panther movies to his legendary blend of cartoon and real life in Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But, despite having three Oscars on his shelf and a legacy of immense influence in his field, there’s an undeniable gap in his history in the form of The Thief and the Cobbler.

In 1964, while working on animations for TV ads, Williams began work on a film inspired by the tales of Mulla Nasruddin, a character from Muslim folklore. Eventually, he changed course and moved onto a story loosely inspired by the Arabian Nights lore. The story was simple: A humble cobbler named Tack must save the Golden City from an invading army, stop the devious vizier, and help the beautiful princess. But on top of that, Williams would throw every animation trick he had at the screen.

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Over the passing years, Williams would dip in and out of working on this pet project. It grew ever more ambitious, with Williams saying his idea was “to make the best animated film that has ever been made.” Funding came and went. Actors recorded dialogue and never saw a frame of animation. Eventually, after the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Williams negotiated a deal with Warner Bros. to get both distribution and the last drop of funding he needed. He had until 1991 to complete the film, but Williams was a slow worker who prized perfection over efficiency. Eventually, Warner Bros. took over the film, fired Williams, and got someone else to finish it. The rough cut was made by a bond company and turned the whole thing into a Disney-esque musical (Don Bluth, the animator behind The Secret of NIMH, was contracted to add one section.) The bond company’s cut, The Princess and the Cobbler, was released in September 1993, but barely anyone saw it.

The following year, the North American rights to the film were bought by Miramax Films, home of notorious abuser Harvey Weinstein. As one of the most impactful companies in Hollywood, Miramax had gained an iron grip over awards season with their Oscar-friendly prestige dramas. Children’s movies, however, weren’t their forte, even though they were a subsidiary of Disney during this era. Still, in 1993 they launched Miramax Family with the express purpose of collaborating with the House of Mouse on “marketing family films to mass audiences.”

Jake Eberts, one of the film’s executive producers, insisted to the Los Angeles Times that Miramax had done a “fabulous job” in their re-edit, now called Arabian Knight. “It was significantly enhanced and changed by Miramax after Miramax stepped in and acquired the domestic [distribution] rights,” Eberts said. “They made extremely good changes.” Said changes, he said, included adding more to the central storyline, giving the mute main characters voices (even though their mouths don’t move so it all ended up as voice-over), and adding songs. The movie was also shortened to a mere 72-minute total running time.

None of these changes helped to make the movie a success. Arabian Knight was all but buried by Miramax, earning only $319,723 on 510 screens in its opening weekend. It received a VHS release and was later made available on LaserDisc to anyone who bought a promotional box of Froot Loops.

It’s hard to ignore how much Arabian Knight plays like one of those Asylum rip-off movies, but of Disney’s Aladdin. Princess Yum-Yum, the sole female lead, has been twisted into a Jasmine-style mold, complete with an “I Want” song that sounds like it was written in six minutes. Tack, as voiced by Matthew Broderick, is a sleepy and less charismatic version of Aladdin but with near-identical motivations. The mute thief is given a voice and uses it to spew lazy pop culture references, probably because Vincent Price was dead and Weinstein couldn’t make him come back for new recording sessions. None of it is funny, and it just distracts from the heart of Williams’ work: his astonishing animation talents.

Williams began work on his film decades before Aladdin was a glint in Jeffrey Katzenberg’s eye, which makes the bastardized 1995 version a strange example of pseudo-plagiarism. The director had long asserted that Disney animators ripped off his work in their mega-hit. In James B. Stewart’s Disneywar, Peter Schneider, the president of Disney’s feature animation department, is quoted as admitting, “We took the best out of Richard.”

What makes Arabian Knight such a frustrating watch is that you can see how close to the real thing it still remains, even in this battered state. Williams’ work is truly jaw-dropping in places. The chase between the title characters that goes through a series of optical illusions is an astonishing display of detail and movement. One-Eye’s Rube Goldberg machine war rig comes together and falls apart so exquisitely, a cycle of dozens of moving parts that must have been a nightmare to plan out. But then a piece of Miramax added animation will be shoved in, one with janky movement and colors that don’t match the original, and the illusion is tainted. Williams’ son Alexander, who also worked on the film, said of the cheaply added footage, “It looks like Saturday morning TV.”

Williams reportedly never saw Arabian Knight, not wanting to see his unfinished work torn to shreds. The movie that never got made became the stuff of animation legend, and over the decades, many efforts were made to restore The Thief and the Cobbler to Williams’ original vison. The Recobbled Cut has received several revisions since its premiere in 2006, incorporating higher-quality materials and details that had previously never seen the light of day. The end result is an impressive feat of fan collaboration that offers as close to the creator’s vision as we’ll ever get, but it’s still dishearteningly unfinished.

Despite all of the drama and corporate meddling, what stands tall is the incredible quality of Williams’ animation and imagination. It’s a blend of Chuck Jones, Salvador Dali, Muslim art, and golden era silent cinema, looking like nothing else before or since. The fluidity of character movement is still impressive, and moments like the vizier shuffling a deck of cards are incredible in their detail. In those scenes completed by Williams, the uncompromising control over his craft is undeniable. It truly was head and shoulders above what else was going on in American animation at the time.

Richard Williams spent decades of his life working on what he believed would be his magnum opus, only for it to be taken from him and rehashed by a notorious bully who saw its artistry as an impediment to commercial success. It’s the story of Hollywood in a nutshell, as well as an infamously common occurrence at Miramax during this period. Weinstein was so well known for taking creative control of movies away from their director that he was nicknamed “Harvey Scissorhands.” Rather than celebrate an artistic achievement, Miramax saw Williams’ work as something to be shaven down into a cheap sideshow for kids who they thought wouldn’t know better. Fortunately, true devotees of animation remained committed to making the impossible possible.

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.