YMMV / The Thief and the Cobbler

• Adorkable: Tack. Just look at him while he's fixing Princess Yum-Yum's shoe. The Miramax cut even describes him as being "too shy to speak."
• Accidental Aesop: A meta example. Along with Heaven's Gate, this film is a good cautionary tale of how Auteur License can blind talented creators to the realistic restraints of time, money and even human capability when trying to make their passion project literally perfect, causing the whole thing to blow up in their face.
• Accidental Innuendo: Pretty much anytime the characters talk about the three golden balls. This one line from Zigzag in particular is probably the most infamous.
  Zigzag: I AM TAKING MY BALLS AND LEAVING!
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Did One-Eye throw Zigzag to the alligators because he didn't take his offer seriously, or was it simply to test his claim of being able to magically control animals?
• Anti-Climax Boss: After being built up for most of the film as the ultimate threat to the Golden City, One-Eye is swiftly defeated just outside its limits. By a tack.
• Awesome Art: Try to remind yourself every ten minutes or so that the film was made entirely with hand-drawn animation, without a computer in sight. Because you will need to.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There's a TON in the "Arabian Knight" (Miramax) cut, but one that stands out is the Thief encountering his mom in the plumbing pipes. It makes about as much sense as it sounds.
  • The scene where the Thief tries to rob from Yum-Yum while she's sleeping, only for her bed to take the form of several beast-like animals and chase the Thief off. Afterwards, this moment is never brought up again.
• Broken Base: Viewers either think the Thief's inner dialogue from the Miramax version was one of the few saving graces, or believe it was part of what ruined the movie.
• Complete Monster (original workprint & "The Recobbled Cut"): Mighty One-Eye 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.
• Cult Classic: A veritable holy grail for animators and animation fans.
• Ending Fatigue: The war machine falling apart. As one observer remarked, it "looks as if someone died from animating it," not only because of the exhaustive, incomparably amazing 3D hand-drawn animation, but for the fact that it goes on for nearly ten minutes after the villain has been defeated (within the 80-minute runtime of the workprint, no less).
• Evil Is Cool: The One-Eye's giant steampunk war machine is awesome, and the animation for its scenes is jaw-droppingly brilliant even by the extremely high standards of the rest of the film.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Fans absolutely hate it when people call it a rip-off of Aladdin, in no small part due to this film having been in production long before Aladdin was.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Disney's Aladdin, which clearly borrowed a lot from this film, which was already 20+ years into production when that one was conceived. Richard Williams would regularly show footage of it to the staff of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, many of whom would later work on it, which didn't help. The more pessimistic fans will say that Disney outright stole Williams' ideas, while those more optimistic assume that it was a pre-emptive Shout-Out, as they had no idea if it was ever going to be completed or not.
• Fanon Discontinuity: To both fans and non-fans of Richard Williams, the Miramax version does not exist. Word of God said that even Richard Williams HIMSELF refused to acknowledge any version other than his workprint and the Recobbled Cut, only submitting the workprint for restoration and archiving.
• Genius Bonus: In the Miramax cut, there is the Thief's mention of only hearing about soap in storybooks and songs. At the time of the film's setting, soap was considered more of a luxury rather than an essential for daily living, with everyone who couldn't afford it attending bath houses. Considering the Thief's occupation and the flies around his head, it is possible that he was denied entry to such establishments and had to live with the smell and the flies.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The thief stealing the film at the end, considering what happened to the film in Real Life.
• Hype Backlash: An increasing number of people are claiming that the film isn't quite the masterpiece its fans make it out to be, feeling that while the animation is top notch the storytelling is weak and several scenes are mainly animation for animation's sake rather than furthering the plot. (As this article puts it, Williams "had 95 minutes of footage for a 79-minute movie.")
• Improved by the Re-Cut: The theatrical cut of the film was hastily made by the distributor Miramax after taking over the project from its creator, Richard Williams, resulting in something extremely different from Williams' original vision and generally negatively received. However, a fanmade re-edited cut of the film, titled the "Re-cobbled Cut", used unfinished storyboards and animation to tell Williams' original vision, which is far more positively received than the Miramax cut.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Thief is a smelly, selfish... well, thief, who keeps finding various ways to get beaten up, first by an old lady, then a polo game, then a self destructing war machine and even a bed that comes alive for no real reason. He only gives up the golden balls by the end because he feels they aren't worth the abuse.
• Love to Hate: Zigzag the sorcerer is huff and puff compared to the One-Eyes, but he's arguably twice as memorable due to a mixture of his Laughably Evil nature, his amazing animation and design, and Vincent Price's delectable performance. It's telling that he's one of the most consistently enjoyable parts between all three versions of the film. Some have even argued that his eventual doom is rather harsh and unnecessary.
• Memetic Mutation: "THE BAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLS ARE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"^ExplanationKing Nod's reaction after finding out the golden balls have been stolen is widely considered to be memorable thanks to his Large Ham acting.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Calvert gets most of the flack for the shoddy animation and did make the decision to add dialogue where it wasn't needed. However, he actually really liked Williams' animation and tried to keep as much of the original as he could but the Completion Company forced him to finish Thief as cheaply as possible and had the movie outsourced twice. Similarly, the only character who was originally mute yet given dialogue in his initial version was Tack, the dialogue given to the Thief and various other characters was a change made when Miramax acquired the distribution rights.
  • Who was it who made Tack tan in the middle of the night? The cel painters. Thankfully, the error has been fixed for Recobbled Cut Mark 4.◊
  • The Completion Bond Company, really. Contrary to popular opinion, they did not "steal" the film. Richard Williams signed a contract with them that said he would complete the film at a fixed date for a specific amount of money, of which he did neither.
• Moe: Tack is adorable, particularly in the original/Recobbled Cut which plays him being a Cute Mute as far up as it will go (which makes his one line in a bassy voice at the very end — reportedly meant to have been played by Sean Connery — that much more unexpected).
• Narm: Some of the character names make it difficult to take the characters seriously during the more dramatic moments, especially Princess Yum-Yum.
• Narm Charm: For some, the Calvert and Miramax versions are these. Special mention for the Thief's snarky inner monologue, which for several is the only redeeming factor of the latter cut.
• Nausea Fuel: Due to the camera angles and the extremely fluid animation on the 3D objects, it can be pretty easy to get a bit of motion sickness while watching the war machine fall apart. Viewers had also reported getting nauseous during the earlier polo game due to the escher-esque changes in perspective.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: By this point, the story of the film's exhaustive production, Williams' tenacity to make it perfect, and its eventual incomplete fate are far more well-known (and arguably more interesting) than what actually happens in it.
• Padding: A handful of scenes, such as the polo game, the war-torn soldier returning to King Nod and especially the war machine, go on several minutes longer than they probably should for no greater reason that Richard Williams wanted the already awesome-looking animation to be even more awesome. Your opinion on these scenes largely depends on how long you're willing to watch animation for animation's sake, or whether if the animation makes you motion sick as mentioned above.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Invoked for the sake of comedy. The skinny, wimpy Tack delivers his sole line in the deep, suave voice of Sean Connery.
  • Played much straighter in the Calvert/Miramax cuts, which either completely redid voice tracks or, more infamously, gave previously nonspeaking characters lines in order to have an All-Star Cast.
  • Perhaps the most notable example is the Miramax cut's casting of Jonathan Winters as the titular thief, who, while vocally fitting the thief's appearance, dubs a near-constant internal monologue of anachronistic lines over every one of the thief's scenes, thus weakening the comedic effect of most of these sequences' original visual gags and slapstick.
• So Okay, It's Average: The consensus of The Recobbled Cut and, by extension, Williams' overall ambition. While nobody is going to balk at the god-tier animation or say that the Miramax version is better, the story is generally agreed to be a sub-par fairy tale with sluggish pacing largely brought on by too much animation for animation's sake.
• Tear Jerker: King Nod freaking out upon seeing his daughter on the battlefield.
• Values Dissonance: Since this film started production in the sixties and ended production in the nineties, there was obviously going to be stuff that didn't carry over as well to its final release. For instance, some of the king's servants resemble antiquated blackface style caricatures with their dark skin and big pink lips (though their skin was turned purple for the Miramax release).
  • Not to mention in the original cut of the film, not only did One-Eye have a harem of female slaves to act as his furniture, but even the 'good' King Nod is gifted a foreign concubine by Grand Vizer Zig-Zag ... whom we see him breaking in later when the Thief accidentally breaks into the king's bathroom. Nothing graphic is shown, but comparatively the scene may have been more acceptable in the 60's when production started than the 90's when it was finally released.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Aside from the unfinished bits? The whole movie. It boasts some of the smoothest, most fluid, and overall most painstaking hand-drawn animation ever put to film (especially, again, the war machine sequence). It's practically... nay, it's literally the only reason the film exists!

---