Once, in the late 1960s, animator Richard Williams had a vision for an animated movie that was to surpass all others, based on the tales of Mullah Nasrudin of Islamic legend. Due to a squabble over copyright eight years later, Williams took his characters (minus Nasrudin), settings, and managed to come up with a plot to tie them all together. Over many more years, the project changed titles repeatedly until it finally gained its permanent name of The Thief and the Cobbler.

The Thief was to be Williams' life work, his magnum opus. He worked on it for the next twenty years on and off. He often did commercials and other features such as Raggedy Ann and Andy to pay for his pet project. However, Williams had two fatal flaws that would prove to be his undoing: his inability to meet deadlines and his perfectionism. He lost funding from several investors, including Prince Faisil of Saudi Arabia.

It wasn't until Williams' work on the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? that Warner Bros. finally picked up The Thief. Work began in earnest, and all but fifteen minutes of film was completed in late 1991, Warner's deadline. Warner Bros. demanded that Williams show them all the material that he had available to assess the situation. This workprint was duplicated, and bootleg copies still exist today in low quality. By this time, however, it was discovered that Disney, after seeing Williams' work on The Thief when he was showcasing his work for Roger Rabbit, had "borrowed" several of Williams' ideas and made Aladdin instead (this form of alleged plagiarism is nothing new with Disney, as those who are familiar with the Lion King/Kimba the White Lion fiasco are aware). Realizing that even if The Thief were finished, it would be opening against Disney's film, Warner Bros. backed out of the deal.

The Completion Bond Company (now defunct, perhaps as a result of the financial pressures of working on The Thief) stepped in, firing everyone from the project...including Williams, who was still working late in the night the last day of work. Fred Calvert, who had a strong background in television animation, was brought in to finish The Thief as quickly as possible at as little cost as possible. "Completion" in this case was a euphemism for butchery of the animated art form.

Fully completed scenes were cut from the movie, songs were added and sent overseas to be animated in Korea by animators who were used to working on Saturday morning cartoons, and voice work was redone (except in the case of Vincent Price, who had died in 1993). It was released quietly in Australia and South Africa as The Princess and the Cobbler, where it certainly didn't break any records at the box office.

For a while, no American distributor would pick up the film. Then Disney subsidiary Miramax decided to take it up. ...and death bells were audible in the distance.

Compared to the Miramax version, Culvert's version was extremely close to Williams' original vision. Miramax dubbed over almost every second of silence in the movie with endless--and pointless--chatter from Tack and the Thief (originally intended as silent characters, and now voiced by Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Winters respectively), converted Princess Yum-Yum into a walking embodiment of modern feminism, redid the subtle color work into almost vulgar garishness, changed the order of events, and cut entire scenes and characters--including the character of the Old Witch, who appears only as a phantom image. It seems as if Miramax were intentionally destroying what was left of the film, making it seem like a low-budget ripoff of Aladdin.

The subtle nuances of Williams' original work are still there, all the beautiful destruction of the Battle Scene, and the opening scene of Tack unknowingly sewing himself to the Thief in his sleep, but compared to the rest, it seems out of place. Relics of the ancient world put on a mantelpiece alongside vintage Coca-Cola bottles. This version of the film, renamed Arabian Knight, only pulled in $300,000 from theaters before it was pulled to be released on video...one year later, under its original title of The Thief and the Cobbler.

But The Thief and the Cobbler it very much isn't. And filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist agreed. In 2005 Gilchrist took it upon himself to create a "Recobbled Cut" of The Thief, using footage from a high-quality version of Williams' workprint, Culvert's version, and rare material from those who worked with Williams on the project. The result is freely available on Torrent sites like Demonoid.com and Mininova.org, and in low quality on Youtube. It is truly remarkable to see Williams' original work as it was meant to be. The Recobbled Cut is a combination of finished and unfinished animation, storyboards, and composite shots to create a widescreen effect. This labor of love, according to Gilchrist, was to create awareness of what might have been and gain enough fan support for the film to encourage Disney to fully restore it the way it was intended.

As for Richard Williams, who had his life's work taken from him, he now spends his time teaching new generations of aspiring animators. His Animator's Survival Kit is the authoritative guidebook on the art, and his workshops are usually sold out. But he refuses to speak of The Thief and the Cobbler at all, perhaps the result of a broken heart.

Overall, The Thief and the Cobbler is the world's greatest lost artifact of modern animation, the likes of which were never seen before and will likely never be seen again. At 31 years, it is the film with the longest production time in history. But it's also a film that will not lay down and die. Whether or not it will ever truly be completed remains to be seen, but it has withstood 31 years of executive meddling and development hell, and it will likely withstand 31 more if it means that it will finally be given the respect and credit it so rightly deserves.

• Amid. "Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut". http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/thief-and-the-cobbler-the-recobbled-cut.html. June 2006
• Briney, Daniel. "The Thief and the Cobbler: How the Best Was Lost, 1968-1995". http://www.culturecartel.com/review.php?aid=1000025/. August 2001
• Lurio, Eric. "Arabian Knightmare". http://www.geocities.com/eddie_bowers/lurio.html. February 2002
  
• Summer, Edward."The Animator Who Never Gave Up--The Unmaking of a Masterpiece". Films in Review Magazine 46. 1995. p. 76-84
• Williams, Alex. "The Thief and the Cobbler". Animation World Magazine, Issue 1.12, March 1997. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.12/articles/williams1.12.html