25. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Film Twenty-Five in the canon. Released July 24, 1985. Directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich.
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes..."
So goes a witch in Shakespeare's Macbeth, it is that line from which Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel gets its title. Bradbury certainly seems an unlikely writer to adapt into Disney animation, but the legendary sci-fi author was in fact a close friend of Walt's. In the early 1980s, Disney's live-action unit had headed into a more mature direction under the leadership of CEO Ron Miller, animation also took a brief detour into the more macabre. The film, which would become one of the more obscure and infamous entries in the canon, is a fairly close adaptation of the book, Bradbury himself wrote the screenplay.
Set in the Midwestern village of Green Town in the 1920s, the story centers around two boys named Jim and Will. One fine autumn day a mysterious, supernatural carnival comes to town, run by the eerie Mr. Dark. The carnival begins to have a strange and sinister influence upon the townspeople, with people being drawn to a carousel that when ridden alters the age of the passengers. The boys deduce that Mr. Dark is draining the townsfolk of their lives and that danger is afoot. As the days go by, Dark begins to stalk the boys and uses his occult powers to attack them several times, each instance the boys narrowly escaping with their lives. With the help of Will's father, Charles, and a lightning rod salesman called Tom Fury, the boys eventually succeed in defeating Dark's circus minions. In the climax, Jim is about to be sacrificed at the carousel by Dark, but is rescued by Will. A tornado strikes the carnival grounds, causing the ride to malfunction with Mr. Dark on it, aging him to dust. Everything wicked is swept away by the tempest, and the boys celebrate the defeat of their foe.
The scary imagery of the film earned it the reputation of being one of Disney's most frightening cartoons, with many reports of children running into movie theater lobbies screaming in terror at scenes with Mr. Dark and his henchmen. The new company management, Micheal Eisner and Jeffery Katzenberg, didn't have the faith in the film as Miller had, this helped result in it being a box office bomb. The heavy production costs, due to all the special effects, meant that Something Wicked only made half of its budget back. Animation at Disney was nearly in the grave, but the commercial success of the next few films would ensure that it would survive.
Unlike other films in the canon, the home video release was greatly delayed due to the horror elements and the film's supposed unpopularity, this long unavailability only added to its mystique among Disney fans. Today, it's something of a cult classic with an occasional broadcast on Disney Channel around Halloween. Bradbury himself was greatly impressed with the final product calling it, "one of the more decent adaptations of my work."
