The Black Cauldron has become one of the great cult films in Disney's history, a darker, stranger picture than anything the studio had attempted, the most expensive animated film made up to that point, the studio's first to take a PG rating and its first to put computer imagery on screen. For all the trouble it caused the animation department, it has been embraced by a devoted following who love it precisely for its ambition and its oddness. These three separate clean-up model sheets carry Fflewddur Fflam the bumbling, lyre-playing bard, the swineherd hero Taran, and Princess Eilonwy, all under the production number 0128, all approved in pencil at the top by Joe Hale, who produced the film and championed the whole troubled adaptation.

A model sheet is the engine room of the animation. An animator's strongest poses and expressions are drawn, cut out, arranged on a board and photostatted, then handed round the unit so everyone working on Taran draws the same Taran. That is why you see the figures grouped this way, the originals literally cut and placed, each sheet built to lock a character's range of attitude, proportion and feature before a frame was shot. Disney never released these to the public because they regarded them as proprietary working tools, the means by which the look of the film was kept consistent. The expressions are where the value sits, the full extent of each character's emotional range pinned down in one place so the unit had no excuse to drift.

The Black Cauldron came from a department determined to make a film for an older audience, drawing on Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, with the studio struggling for years over how to animate convincing human leads. These sheets are exactly the discipline that ambition demanded.

The sheets come from the estate of Cathy Zar, a Disney ink-and-paint and production artist whose long career at the studio ran through this difficult, transitional stretch of its history. Andreas Deja, the legendary Disney animator, remembered her warmly as part of the close-knit team that kept the department running, the kind of dedicated studio hand whose work touched film after film without ever drawing attention to itself. To have working material of this kind survive, direct from such an artist's own hands, is the rarest way these things reach a collector.

Few model sheets from this film exist at all. To have the three central friends of Prydain together, approved by the producer himself, is a working document from the heart of how the film was actually built.