A Criminally Overlooked Mastermind of Animation: Richard Williams
A pioneer of hand-drawn animation, Richard Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, director, and writer best known for his role as animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). Williams has a very interesting history career-wise, one of obstinate devotion and unyielding perfectionism. In an age where hand-drawn animation is becoming less and less common, here’s to remembering Williams’ masterfully innovative works that paved the way for today’s animation greats.
A Brief History
Williams, the son of an illustrator and a painter, grew up in a creative environment. His mother read him stories of the Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle-Eastern folktales, which would later inspire The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). As a child, Williams dreamed of getting into Disney to learn from the animators, and through persistence, he did. According to Williams, animators at Disney taught him that rather than learning to animate, he should learn to draw. Heeding their advice, he studied fine art at the Ontario College of Art years later and began making advertisements for companies as early as 17-years-old.
In 1953, Williams lost all interest in animation after being “moved to tears” by an exhibition of paintings by Rembrandt in his early 20s. He left Canada and settled in Ibiza, a Spanish island, where he lived for two years and became a painter, finding inspiration from the local circus performers and clowns. These sketches would later become the short film Circus Drawings, completed almost 50 years later in 2010. Fast-forwarding a couple years, in 1955, when Williams was about 22-years-old, he left Ibiza and moved to England where he would work mainly on TV commercials. At this point, he realized he hated the art world and wanted to get back into animation. This is when he began working on his first animated short film, The Little Island (1958), which would become a big hit and launch his career.
His Career: 1960s & 1970s
In the early 1960s, Williams established his own animation company in Soho, London, Richard Williams Animation Ltd, which produced over 2,500 TV commercials and won numerous awards. He would go on to produce a few short films, such as Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962) and A Lecture on Man (1962). During this time, he was also responsible for a myriad of title sequences for films like What’s New Pussycat? (1965) and Casino Royale (1967). In the mid-1960s, Williams began work on a personal project that he intended to be “the best animated feature ever,” Nasrudin, which would evolve into what we now know as The Thief and the Cobbler. His TV commercials were his main source of income, and would be put right back into funding his production of the film.
In 1971, Williams directed the Academy-award winning animated adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the design of the film based on the original 1843 engravings. Some of his notable works from the 70s include title sequences for Return of the Pink Panther (1975) and The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), direction of the full-length feature film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), as well as illustrations for Idries Shah’s English translations of the stories of Nasrudin. Around 1973 is when William’s began re-imagining his personal project, Nasrudin, the story evolving eventually to the one we know today. He animated many of the scenes himself and spent years perfecting a single scene in which the villain of the story, ZigZag, shuffles a deck of cards.
The standard approach to animating a simple action at this point in the industry was to animate on 2s, meaning that there is one drawing for every two frames, resulting in 12 drawings for one full second of film. However, Williams deviated from this approach, animating instead on 1s; one drawing for every single frame. This method of animation was incredibly expensive and time consuming, but Williams was passionate, stubborn, and persistent. This, unfortunately, would be one of the many contributors to the downfall of what could have been his masterpiece, The Thief and the Cobbler (1993), but it yields incredibly fluid results.
“I said to Zemeckis, ‘I don’t want to do this film because it doesn’t work.’ He said, ‘I know, that’s why we’re hiring you.’”
His Career: 1980s & 1990s
In 1987, Williams embarked on his biggest project yet — Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). He was reluctant to work on the film, feeling that animation and live action weren’t compatible. However, Disney and Spielberg promised Williams that in return for his work on the film, they would help fund and produce his favorite project, The Thief and the Cobbler. Of course, he couldn’t resist, so he went ahead with designing the characters and pushing production to go above and beyond. The film used a moving camera, which was more expensive and more work for the animators, but Williams knew giving the animated characters these perspectives would only work to make the film that much better. This drawing in perspective for animation would become a major staple for Williams’ overall filmography.
With The Thief in full production for the first time, Williams was a perfectionist to the end, which would ultimately lead to the film’s demise. As we already know, he spent years perfecting the story and certain scenes in the film. Production under Warner Bros. was no different. He didn’t meet deadlines because of his perfectionist nature, he refused to create storyboards because he found such a method too controlling, and the film went over budget. Animators were working overtime, often 60 hours per week, to get the project done. It became a regular thing for Williams to fire his employees for not being able to meet his standards. Albeit, he was just as hard on himself as he was his employees, being the first one in the studio and the last one out.
Due to Williams’ perfectionism, though, Warner Bros. decided to hand the project over to the Completion Bond Company, just fifteen minutes of film away from being completed, and it’s here that the film would undergo devastating changes. Now under television animation producer Fred Calvert’s control, mediocre musical numbers would be added, as well as even less than mediocre voice acting for characters originally intended to be silent. The last fifteen minutes of animation are laughable, scenes from the original cut were taken out to make room for Calvert’s additions, the unwatchable final cut a degradation of Williams’ vision. After flopping, Miramax would buy the rights and butcher it even further, releasing it in the US as Arabian Knight.
This was around the same time that Disney’s Aladdin started production, which bore striking similarities to The Thief, such as character design and general aesthetic. This is no coincidence, as animators working for Williams on The Thief moved on to Disney with his ideas.
The Thief and the Cobbler was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016 as The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment In Time, and can be watched in full on Youtube the way it was intended to be — or at least as close to it as possible.
“This is my best work, because I’m completely alone.”
His Career: 2000s
Williams published a how-to book on animation called The Animator’s Survival Kit in 2002 based on his teachings and notes, the book soon becoming a key reference for animators.
In 2015, his short film Prologue received an Oscar nomination as well as a BAFTA nomination in the category of Best Animated Short. Prologue is the first twelve minutes of his hand-drawn feature film Lysistrata, based on an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes in which women withhold sex from their male counterparts in order to end a war. He described the film as “the only thing so far in my career that I’ve ever really been pleased with,” having the highest level of creative freedom he’d ever had, and joked that it should be subtitled, “Will I Live to Finish It?” Of course, he wouldn’t and, like The Thief and the Cobbler, it will forever be an unfinished masterpiece. However, the bit that we do get to see is an incredible piece of hand-drawn animation that truly speaks to who Williams was as an artist.
Influence
Richard Williams has been one of my favorite animators since I was a child. I owned The Thief and the Cobbler on DVD and watched it on a loop for years, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I would realize the artistic genius behind Williams’ work. He was a true artist, an artist that wanted to “make his paintings move.” An artist who was convinced that if Rembrandt were alive he wouldn’t be able to resist animation. An artist who was passionate about bringing drawings to life and had the patience (and stubbornness) to do it. He taught me a lot about being an artist, about following your dreams, and about doing what you want to do and what makes you happy rather than what everyone else thinks is right or better.
As Williams put it; “It’s the doing of it that matters. Do it for the love of it. That’s all there is.”
