Poor Man’s Aladdin — no need for a clever comparison here. It just is.

★★☆☆☆

This week David assigned me an animated film. I’ve been dragging him to our local theatre’s showings of Studio Ghibli movies and I think he wanted to return the favor. This movie is about a poor orphan boy growing up in a huge Arabian city. He is set on his way by a wise cracking, anachronist-dropping character. He falls in love with the princess, but has to deal with the sultan’s sorcerer/advisor. The sorcerer has plans to force the princess into marrying him so he can take over and rule the great city. Oh and also the sorcerer has a talking bird. The title of this post probably ruined the reveal of this paragraph, but I am not talking about Disney’s Aladdin, I am talking about The Thief and the Cobbler.

Stuck in development hell since the 1960s, The Thief and the Cobbler premiered in the U.S. in 1995 under the tile Arabian Knight. This was the year after its rich-man disney’s counterpart. It had been released two other times prior, but the US version had been heavily edited, with some risqué scenes removed, musical numbers added, and additional voiceover and dialogue recorded. This version was later renamed to The Thief and the Cobbler, added to Netflix, and was seen by me.

This is not a very good movie. The voice over dialogue is clunky. The thief feels totally out of placed with his pop culture references. The music is — well — god awful. Just really really bad songs. And that is coming from a man who appreciates a great disney song. They are just an insult to the whole genre of animated musicals. All of these things annoyed me to no end. But, they weren’t even supposed to be there! It wasn’t until after I saw the movie that I realized all of these things were added later. In the original, the thief and the cobbler have a whole two lines of dialogue between them. There is only a small bit of expository voiceover in the beginning. And best of yet, no horrible music!

Unfortunately, this movie was not the one I watched. I tried tracking down the original, but was only able to find bits and pieces of it on Youtube. I can not recommend the version that is on Netflix. I know David assigned it to me because of scenes like this one. But there weren’t enough to make it worth your time. Just watch that YouTube clip instead. While that animation is very cool, and I know some people will like it a lot, but I still prefer the pastoral scenes of Miyazaki to the hectic MC-Escher world of this movie.

A really bad version of this film is streaming on Netflix.

Next week, I respond with Princess Mononoke. If I can’t get David to love this movie, I’ll only have one bullet left in the anime clip.