There’s not much I can add to the The Thief and the Cobbler’s legend except to say “yes, it’s that movie.”

It’s the troubled masterpiece of Canadian-British animator Richard Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc). He was an obsessive perfectionist/auteur in an industry with little tolerance for either of those things. It’s said that The Thief and the Cobbler took thirty years to make, but that’s not quite true. The film was never finished. The Thief and the Cobbler took thirty years to not make.

This adds to the film’s aura: strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist. But its legacy mainly rests on the fact that it has possibly the best 2D animation ever seen in a feature-length workprint.

It’s 90 minutes of an animator making cel sheets his bitch. The film is beyond technically impressive and approaches “insane”. Richard Williams storyboards things you’re never supposed to do in 2D animation and then does them twice, backward, wearing Persian slippers. Revolving POV shots. Crowd scenes. Textured fabric. You name it, this movie has it. The only computers involved were the ones that processed the bankruptcy and liquidation of his studio.

Any animation nerd can quote favorite moments by heart. Tack tumbling out of his workshop, with dozens of individually animated tacks spilling from his pockets into Zigzag’s path. The Thief crawling through the palace sewer system, with pipes bulging out comically. Zigzag climbing a spiral staircase. Tack fighting the Thief for Yum-Yum’s shoe inside the MC Escherian palace. The Thief getting thrashed by polo players, with the ball implausibly following him around like a target-seeking missile. The dolly shot of One-Eye’s camp, zooming out from the middle of his iris.

And of course, the destruction of One Eye’s massive war machine, which is so excessive and overstimulating that you’ll snort coke just to calm down. It’s not just animation for animation’s sake, either. The film has a lot of style, and evokes the mythical Orient far more effectively than, say, Aladdin (which comes off as American teenagers at a Vegas hotel by comparison). The Thief and the Cobbler looks the way a Persian carpet would if the stitches could move.

Margaret French’s story (a simple fairytale) isn’t that interesting when stripped of its visuals. It’s a good example of how technique itself can be art: instead of animation being used to tell a story, a story is used as a scaffold for animation itself. Which is fine, although it requires a shift of thinking for people used to stories being paramount.

The characters are stock archetypes: Tack is a silent film hero, the Thief is a silent film villain, Nod is a sleepy king, One-Eye is a barbarian invader. Zigzag (with a cel-sheet chewing performance by Vincent Price) is a hilarious camp villain. The characters’ behaviors are as simple as their movement is intricate: this is a movie simple enough for the smallest child to understand.

The tale of the movie’s production is long, harrowing, and (ultimately) tragic. After decades of tinkering on the film (with a few injections of cash from such parties as the House of Saud), Williams finally received full financing in the late 80s. This lifeline became a noose. When he failed to deliver the film on time, the project was taken away from him, and auctioned off in a lowest-bidder situation to whoever would get it done cheaply.

That someone was Fred Calvert, who “finished” the film in 1993. I don’t mean he completed The Thief and the Cobbler. I mean he slapped together a film-shaped object for as little money as possible, which incidentally contains some of Williams’ animation.

Calvert is defined by The Thief and the Cobbler‘s destruction the way Richard Williams is defined by its creation. Fans universally regard him as having ruined the movie. He’s the ultimate bad Hollywood stereotype: the studio hatchet man. The movie’s final gag (which involves the thief ripping the film from the reel and stuffing it into his pocket) seems eerily prophetic.

Yes, it’s hard to excuse what Calvert did. His new scenes look as shoddy and cheap as a Saturday morning cartoon: they stick out like twine and tissue paper holding together fine damask curtains. Calvert didn’t “edit” Williams’ footage so much as randomly guillotine it into shape. Important parts of the story are now gone: we don’t see Zigzag attempting to feed Tack to Phido, which lessens the poetic justice of Zigzag’s death. The brigands have nothing to do in Calvert’s version, while in Williams’ workprint we see at least see them fighting in the final battle. Scenes of soldiers dying were shortened or cut (for violence?), which leaves us wondering where One-Eye’s army went.

Calvert added four songs, because animated musicals were big that year. We shall not speak of these songs, because they make getting crapped on by an elephant seem like a joy.

In September 1993, the film saw limited release in South Africa (why?) and Australia (why?). It was released again in August 1995 after a further round of destructive edits and general stupidity. (Fun fact: the green women were cut because they could be interpreted as One-Eye’s sex slaves…an edit personally requested by Harvey Weinstein!).

Neither release made money. The total production budget was in excess of $25 million, and although the movie’s box office profits are unclear due to the film’s complicated release history, they couldn’t have reached a million dollars. Shovel twenty five million dollars down a garbage disposal unit, and then sell a small piece of beachfront real estate in Florida. Congrats: you’re financially ahead of the Thief and the Cobbler.

Calvert minimized his role in the disaster, saying he never had creative control over The Thief and the Cobbler, and that most of the bad decisions (such as the songs) were forced on him by higher-ups. True or false? Who knows? Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.

But Calvert can be defended a little, too. At least he can say he delivered a finished film. Mangled and butchered though it was, his movie exists. Richard Williams couldn’t finish his after thirty years and God knows how many millions of pounds. Look at the work print: it still wasn’t close to being done. The princess was still half-animated. Critical scenes did not exist.

Calvert made some defensible decisions. He tightened up the story. The main villain (One-Eye) is established right at the start, instead of coming out of nowhere in the second act, and he has a better voice and a better death (his concubines throw him into the burning wreck of the machine, instead of sitting on him). The Thief’s characterization is more defined: he now has a fetish for golden things specifically, instead of just stealing everything he can. Detours (such as the maid from Mombasa) are cut, and the movie is better for it.

Blame should go to Williams as well as Calvert. The perfectionism that made The Thief and the Cobbler great also dug its grave: why did he waste so much time animating superfluous scenes of the Thief? They’re fun, but they’re not the movie. There’s enough effort on the screen to make three animated films, it just wasn’t used efficiently. He was his own worst enemy. There’s a saying in Hollywood that if the audience leaves praising the set design, the film is a bomb. The Thief and the Cobbler’s workprint is all set design.

Transhumanists speak about “paperclip maximizing”, conveying the idea that a superintelligent AI need not be malicious to screw us over. It might merely want to build as many paperclips as possible, until they cover the planet. No matter how benign or innocuous your goal (“make paperclips!”), it will destructive in the hands of a machine, because it can’t understand the big picture.

Williams was a human paperclip maximizer. He seems to have been guided by an imperative to make pretty animation, so he made more of it, and more of it, and more of it, and never knew when to stop. This would be fine, if he was spending his own money. But once outside financing gets involved, there’s only so long you’ll be allowed to chase a dream. If you owe a bank five dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe a bank five million, that’s their problem. Money always comes with strings attached, and when the sums are large, the strings become golden handcuffs.

The Thief and the Cobbler is a story of glory and grandeur, of madness and excess, of ruin and shadow and devouring flame. It’s also a film about a cobbler.

Maybe I’m swimming against the tide here, but I don’t think pedophilia’s that great.

Like, what’s the sales pitch? Date someone with no money and no car, who needs help with their homework and thinks PAW Patrol is the shit? No thanks.

Lolishit is a breakcore act. No idea who’s behind it (the FBI, probably). To explain, a “loli” is a very young (usually prepubescent) girl. A “lolicon” is a (usually male) person with an affinity for lolis. These are Japanese words—things the West regards as horrible misdeeds become almost acceptable when translated to Japanese, just part of the Oriental mystique. Meanwhile, Japan’s birthrate just fell to a new low of 1.36 children per woman. Considering how obsessed they are with young girls, they don’t seem keen on creating more of them.

Chest Flattener is the kind of cultural artifact that basically never existed before the internet. “Schoolgirl With Hair-Drills” kicks off the album with 180bpm breakbeats that chop like machine gun bullets. Everything is rhythm and groove. The only (slight) hint of melody is the shrieking, cut-up vocal samples from some anime I can’t recognize.

The other songs are the same. “MOEXTONE” is a speedcore/extratone track that sounds like it has a four digit bpm. Occasionally there are quotations from anime’s mash-up scene (Touhou, etc). “Deaf to All but the Misao”, for example, has a synth line highly suggestive of ZUN’s “UN Owen Was Her”.

Chest Flattener provides little ammunition for the critic. After 16 minutes, the album ends, and there is silence. It’s hyper-aware and deliberately disposable, and seems to have been created with a sneer. It’s not totally dashed off rubbish, but this isn’t music that was slaved over for months and months, either. It lives in the moment, dies in the next, sparkles like froth as it disintegrates. It’s memes set to music.

It combines a few different things – internet irony poisoning, anime mash-ups, the calculated pop-transgression of Shintaro Kago or Yandere Simulator, underground breakcore – and packages it all up under a “cover” that’s probably a picture stolen off Danbooru. If anything, Chest Flattener reminds me of a “metal” “band” called Sloth. They formed in the early 90s and were an actual sludge metal band, with albums and a label and so on. In recent years they have morphed into a terrible noise project run by an insane person. Under the Sloth name he’s released hundreds (if not thousands) of Bandcamp-only “singles” containing blasts of random distorted noise, with pornographic covers and titles like Sharing Treats With The Cat Is Where It’s At ‎.

Sloth is the maximal endpoint of Lolishit. Basically, if music like this ever appears on your radar, it’s a sign that you’re spending too much time online and may want to quote touch grass unquote as the kids say now. Add it to a playlist and let the government add you to a watchlist.

(NB. Lolicons are not pedophiles. Why would you even think that? Their favorite loli is actually a 1000-year-old demon, or an android. Lolicons spend 10% enjoying lolis and 90% of their time lawyering excuses for enjoying lolis.)

The more a monster is written about, the more it becomes the hero. Jason Vorhees was a villain in the first Friday the 13th. By the sixth or seventh, he’d become an icon, an institution, a machete and hockey mask on a t-shirt, with millions of fans cheering when he kills a camper.

Any book on forbidden behavior has to walk the same line.  Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische, Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 text on sexual pathology, is written with caution and asperity, clearly afraid that it will inspire as well as inform. It’s a catalog of deviant sexual behaviors, but doesn’t want to be a sales catalog. It hides delicate ideas behind a haze of Latin, and the reader will encounter terms like “paedicatio puellarum” (anal intercourse with girls), and “spuerent et faeceset urinas in ora explerent” (spitting, defecating, and urinating in the mouth).

The book is explicitly “addressed to earnest investigators in the domain of natural science and jurisprudence”. And “In order that unqualified persons should not become readers, the author saw himself compelled to choose a title understood only by the learned.”

These days, the telescope points the other way. Krafft-Ebing’s forbidden fantasies are all over the internet, and many aren’t even forbidden anymore. Now, it’s an interesting look at the 19th century man’s view.

Psychopathia Sexualis sees science shifting from the pre-modern view (where deviancy is caused by sin and moral failure), to the modernist view (deviancy is a pathology under the scope of medicine). There’s even parts where Krafft-Ebing seems to ancitipate the post-modern perspective of Thomas Szasz, where perversions don’t exist: just morally neutral preferences. This is seen in his discussions of “urnings”, or male homosexuals.

The observation of Westphal, that the consciousness of one congenitally defective in sexual desires toward the opposite sex is painfully affected by the impulse toward the same sex, is true in only a number of cases. Indeed, in many instances, the consciousness of the abnormality of the condition is want- ing. The majorityof urnings are happy in their perverse sexual feeling and impulse, and unhappy only in so far as social and legal barriers stand in the way of the satisfaction of their instinct toward their own sex.

There’s still premodernity to Krafft-Ebing’s thinking. Note the “jurisprudence” part of the intro – the book (in part) is meant to assist law enforcement in rendering swift and effective punishment to wrongdoers. He frequently refers to masturbators as “sinners”, and few modern medical textbooks would cite the book of Genesis as a source. But these might be more fig leaves against controversy. Krafft-Ebing is clearly fascinated by these people, and includes copious case notes on sadists, masochists, fetishists of feet and leather and furs, and exponents of rougher trade.

Case 42. A married man presented himself with numerous scars of cuts on his arms. He told their origin as follows : When he wished to approach his wife, who was young and somewhat “nervous,” he first had to make a cut in his arm. Then she would suck the wound, and during the act become violently excited sexually.

The literary work of Baron von Sacher Masoch and the Marquis de Sade are also mentioned. The latter’s works were banned at the time and very hard to find, so I wonder how Krafft-Ebing came to know of them.

Taxil (op.cit.)gives more detailed accounts of this sexual monster, which must have been a case of habitual satyriasis, accompanied by perverse sexual instinct. Sade was so cynical that he actually sought to idealize his cruel lasciviousness, and become the apostle of a theory based upon it. He became so bad (among other things he made an in- vited company of ladies and gentlemen erotic by causing to be served to them chocolate bon-s which contained cantharides)that he was committed to the insane asylum at Charenton. During the revolution of 1790, he escaped. Then he wrote obscene novels filled with lust, cruelty, and the most obscene scenes. When Bonaparte became Consul, Sade made him a present of his novels magnificently bound. The Consul had the works de- stroyed, and the author committed to Charenton again, where he died, at the age of sixty four.

(Is this historical tidbit true? Probably not. Sade published Justine and Juliette anonymously, he wouldn’t have drawn attention to himself with a personal gift of them to Napoleon. Sade was almost destitute at the time Napoleon became Consul anyway, and could ill have afforded expensive gifts. Napoleon committed Sade to Sainte-Pélagie Prison and then Bicêtre Asylum, it was his family that had him moved to Charenton. “Taxil” is likely the proven fraud Leo Taxil.)

Hiram Maxim and Mikhail Kalashnikov lent their names to guns. Sade and Sacher Masoch lent their names to diseases (or so Krafft-Ebing considers them). But that’s the issue at the heart of it all: what’s a disease?

Krafft-Ebing doesn’t seem to know of Darwin, but he gets basically to the same place. Basically, humans have a thing called fitness. We are supposed to survive, and make more of ourselves. Things that get in the way of doing either thing are diseases.

The state of liking blue over isn’t red is not a “disease”. Even if this preference was caused by a brain-controlling bacteria, we wouldn’t call it a disease, assuming that was all it did. It doesn’t impact our fitness.

But male homosexuality is clearly a disease, by a Darwinian standpoint. It reduces reproductive fitness by something like 50-80%. Most would object to calling, mostly because “disease” also has a lot of connotations (that it’s infectious, that it should be cured, etc). I don’t agree. Humans are partly reproduction machines, but also something more: we have a consciousness and a higher goals. There’s nothing inherently wrong with actions that clash with evolution’s “design”, which was largely shaped by chance anyway.

Krafft-Ebing notes that many gay men seem to have artistic gifts.

In the majority of cases, psychical anomalies (brilliant endowment in art, especially music, poetry, etc., by the side of bad intellectual powers or original eccentricity) are present

Suppose that’s true. Would that be a bad disease to have if you deeply desired to be an artist (and lived in a world of in-vitro fertilization?)

I regard homosexuality as a “wrong note” in Darwin’s musical score. Just because something’s technically wrong doesn’t mean we have to regard it as a thing to be fixed. No musician would call a piece of music flawed because it uses non-diatonic notes. Jazz musicians, for example, speak reverently of “blue notes”, which are pitched differently from standard. It all depends on the larger context. Technical deviancy doesn’t imply moral deviancy.

In some cases, the pre-modern viewpoint aligns more closely with the 21st century’s one than it does with Krafft-Ebing. A medieval bailiff would have viewed sodomy (for example) as a choice. An expression of preference. Contemporary culture thinks it’s the same. Krafft-Ebing seems the odd man out by calling it a degenerative pathology.

Here’s another interesting footnote:

I follow the usual terminology in describing bestiality and pederasty under the general term sodomy. In Genesis (chap,xix),whence this word comes, it signifies exclusively the vice of pederasty. Later, sodomy was often used synonymously with bestiality. The moral theologians, like St. Alphons of Liguori, Gury, and others, have always distinguished correctly, i.e., in the sense of Genesis, between sodomia, i.e.,concubittis cum persona ejusdem sexus, and bestialitas, i.e.,concubitus cum bestia (comp. Olfus, Pastoralmedicin, p. 78).

The premodern world actually understood well that bestiality and pederasty are distinct things. It with the Victorian world that blurred them into one undifferentiated sex act. A useful reminder that mankind can seem to progress scientifically, while in fact drawing blinds tighter around the truth.

Sade seems like a good place to end on. “It is a danger to love men, A crime to enlighten them.”