The Cauldron-Born rise here, the army of the dead summoned by the Horned King, and this long panoramic setup catches them mid-march across the green murk of his castle halls. "Now I call on my army of the dead. The Cauldron-Born, arise! My messengers of death." For anyone who saw The Black Cauldron young, that line and what follows it never quite left. This is the sequence that earned the film its reputation as the darkest thing Disney had ever put on screen.

The Film has no relief in it. No songs, no jokes, no warmth to break the dread. The cauldron belches its luminous green mist, the vapour creeps over old bones, and ancient dead warriors stand and shoulder their arms. It was gruesome enough in its original cut that Jeffrey Katzenberg personally ordered it back, and roughly twelve minutes left the film before release. The face-to-face slaughter of the castle guards, flesh melting away, never reached cinemas. What survived is what you see marching here: skeletal soldiers in scavenged armour, axes and halberds and battered shields raised, the whole grim host advancing.

This is a multi-cel pan setup, built wide so the camera can travel across it, and to stage a full army you layer characters across the width of the sheet rather than separating each onto its own level. Several Cauldron-Born are held here as one composition, the figures at the centre and right of the march fully painted in colour, and on the left the line art carries through to the next stage of the army's formation. Reading left to right you are looking at the production breakdown of how Disney built a crowd of the dead, the painted ranks giving way to the inked work behind them. It is an unusually generous slice of the sequence to find on a single setup.

The cels are laminated, measuring approximately 40cm by 76cm across the pan, with bottom peg holes intact and the official Studio Art Programme seal present. The piece was released through the Disney theme park store, now set against a fine art giclée background perfectly representing the scene on screen. The condition is excellent throughout, with only a small crease in the laminate on one of the sheets. The painted figures hold their colour beautifully against the sickly green of the castle floor.

The Black Cauldron is a film that is now loved and filled with nostalgia, often revisited on platforms such as Disney+, having long been hard to find and own. To own a wide pan of the Cauldron-Born themselves, the very thing that made the film notorious, is to hold the most genuinely menacing image the studio committed to screen in that era.