A life dedicated to the art of animation
Richard Williams was described as “the face of animation” by film historian John Canemaker, author of the book Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation (2001, Disney Editions). The comparison is not exaggerated. He animated, produced, directed, wrote, illustrated and even voice acted for animation — he was the voice of Droopy in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Touchstone Pictures).
For Williams, there was not a reason to do anything if you wouldn’t reach the best possible result. At the age of 35 he already was the head of a renewed animation studio, had been awarded internationally and was very well requested in the industry.
Animation titans such as Ken Harris (1898–1982), forerunner of animation at Warner Bros and the Looney Tunes (the Bugs Bunny gang), and Roy Naisbitt, (89) who worked with Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer), worked with Williams in several projects in his studio in London.
Richard Edmund Williams was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1933. He was the son of Leslie Lane, a renewed illustrator that was the source of inspiration for Williams.
The passion for animation began early, at age 10, when he read the book How to Make Animated Cartoons, by Nat Falk, now out of print. Published in 1941, this preciousness depicted the seven major animation studios at the time, such as Disney, Warner Bros and Terrytoons. It was didactically straightforward and it would serve as an excellent support material for Williams while creating the concepts of character animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit more than four decades later.
When he was 12 years old, Williams did his first animated piece: a walk cycle of a bird for his history class. At 15 he decided to make a 5-day trip from Toronto to Los Angeles to discover the Disney studios. Just like filmmaker Steven Spielberg tried to infiltrate in the Universal Studios lot and to escape the tours, Williams did the same at Disney to introduce his achievements do some animators. And he was very well received. He met giants from the studio such as Richard Kelsey (1905–1987) and Ward Kimball (1914–2002). Richard Kelsey was the father of the famous pixie dust in Cinderella (1950) in which her clothes transform into a beautiful dress, later becoming a trademark of the studio. Ward Kimball was one of the Nine Old Men of Disney, something similar to the “Nine Elders of Disney”, who were major animators of the studio’s golden age. They were responsible for classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940) and Dumbo (1941). Kimball won an Oscar in 1970 of Best Animated Short-Film for It’s Tough to be a Bird. He even got to meet Walt Disney himself, but said in a lecture in the New York MoMA, with John Canemaker (February of 2018), that he “wasn’t interested in meeting him, because Walt Disney didn’t draw”.
William’s first big lesson came from Kelsey, who at the time had already been the production designer of films such as Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi (1942). In one of the stories that Williams tells in The Animator’s Survival Kit he quotes Kelsey’s big advice: “First of all, kid, learn to draw. You can always do the animation stuff later”. After coming back home, Williams phoned Kelsey and asked again what he should do. For which Kelsey replied: “I told you what to do! Learn to draw!”.
Williams took the advice seriously and got into an art school. At the age of 16, he was already working with commercial illustrations. His interest for animation vanished for a period, for he was determined to learn how to draw. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Ibiza, Spain, where he dedicated himself to painting for two years.
At age 22, Williams was invited by George Dunning (1920–1979), director of the feature-film “Yellow Submarine” (1968), to work on commercial in United Productions of America (UPA) in London. This was a time which Williams was trying to escape the Hollywood monopoly. In the same conversation with John Canemaker in the New York MoMa, Williams admitted that he as arrogant when young and thought that the Disney style was tacky, sentimental and with a mechanical process of production.
When he wasn’t working with Dunning, Williams used his free time to work on his first short-film. The Little Island was completed in 1958 and in the following year, at 26 years of age, Williams was awarded with his first BAFTA of Best Animated Short-Film.
The short-film was showed to the UPA’s director Leo Salkin (1913–1993), director of the special for television short-film The 2000 Year Old Man of Crossbow Productions, who wasn’t impressed. Williams only got promoted to the seat of animator after making a commercial for Bob Godfrey (1921–2013), who won an Oscar of Best Animated Short-Film for Great. Six months later, Williams was promoted to the director seat, but the UPA’s unit in London closed its doors. Williams then produced commercials for Dunning for more three months, and decided to create his own studio. It was in Richard Williams Animation where he spent most of his career.
Until 1992, when the studio closed, Williams and his team produced more than 2.500 commercials and gave the most diverse services of animation to live-action films, many times to big names in the industry. For Tony Richardson — director of Tom Jones (1963, Woodfall Film Productions) — and Blake Edwards — director of the film series “The Pink Panther” from 1963 until 1993 -, for instance, Williams created the opening animations and drew the posters. His most notable works include What’s New Pussycat? (1965, Famous Artists Productions), Casino Royale (1967, Famous Artists Productions), The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols/Lawrence Turman Productions), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968, Woodfall Film Productions) and The Return of the Pink Panther (1975, ITC Entertainment).
Williams did not see the production of animation as a job, much less as a career. The Cartoon Brew channel described his passion in an article in dedication of his death as “a way of life, a religion” which he never got “enough of it”.
To stimulate his staff, he constantly invited prestigious animators and artists to teach and share their knowledge with the youngsters. One of the most significant ones was Art Babbitt (1907–1992) — animator of the mushroom dance in Fantasia’ (1940) -, who gave several classes to the animators and even contributed to some of Williams’ projects.
This was the studio’s routine: lectures and classes with titans of animation in the morning; work in the afternoon; homework from the lectures at night. This is where the american animator Eric Goldberg was discovered, one of Disney’s most prestigious animators, where he works since 1992.
The persistence and focus in the technical development influenced one of Williams’ most recognized films: The Thief and the Cobbler (1993, Warner Bros and Miramax), which its production differs from any other production in film history. Due to its constant interruptions, the film took more than 30 years to be completed.
Williams and his team financed the project with money from their commercial jobs and movie openings, but his insistence on wanting to produce the biggest and the best animation film of all times led to contribute to the delay of the film’s release and to successive budget overflows.
The development of this film began in 1966, when Williams had the idea to adapt into an animation the book The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by Idries Shah (1924–1996), published in the same year. He was very well known to the story, for he had illustrated the book, and the author’s brother, Omar Ali-Shah (1922–2005), worked in his studio as a producer.
Williams highlighted in the animation industry with The Thief and the Cobbler after winning his first Academy Award in 1972 for the short-film A Christmas Carol, adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens (1812–1870). The film involved Chuck Jones (1912–2002) — Warner Bros’ director of animation who directed more than 200 Looney Tunes cartoons — as an executive producer. The film’s development process was described by Williams as “a trial run for our feature (The Thief and the Cobbler)” and the chance to discover their weak spots and strengths in moments of pressure. Throughout the years, the film would pass through several changes.
In 1973 Williams had already produced more than 3 hours of animation, but according a testimony from composer Howard Blake, 80, in the documentary Persistence of Vision (2012, Kevin Schreck Productions), the whole thing seemed more like a compilation of short stories then a movie itself. To complicate even further, divergences with the family’s author came up. They wanted 50% of everything that was raised and related to the main character, Nasrudin. And under the fire, Williams accused Omar, his producer, of diverting the studio’s money and Omar stepped down from office, taking with him all the rights for the character and story of Nasrudin. The only thing which Williams was still allowed to work with was a secondary character: the Thief. After all of this, nine years of animation work had just been thrown away.
The documentary ‘Persistence of Vision’ tells that the animator Ken Harris got to the studio one day and saw all of his drawings being removed from his desk. When he asked what was going on, he was answered that they wouldn’t work with Nasrudin anymore. Harris then breathed and said: “Well, back to work!”.
With the main story scrapped, Williams joined composer Howard Blake to write a new version of the screenplay, and was advised to work in a character inspired on Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They ended up creating Tack, the Cobbler. The story created by Williams and Blake would still be altered several times, specially with the involvement of Margaret French, a Williams’ lover. But in 1973 the plot was completed and the team imagined that the film would finally be made. This, however, did not happen.
Williams demanded a lot from his staff. Special effects artist Chris Knott tells in Persistence of Vision that “he had a terrible reputation (…) he could be the best or the worst”. He also says that Williams had very high standards which he applied not only to himself, but above all, to everyone else. In the same documentary, animator Julianna Franchetti estates that Williams “would be very volatile quite often, very emotional about things if people did things incorrectly, he’d want to fire them. His phrase was, ‘There’s the door’”.
In an exclusive interview for LabJor FAAP, canadian animator Nik Ranieri — who collaborated with Williams in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”- said, however, that Williams “believed in praise as much as he did in criticism. (…) Dick (Williams) pushed his animators to do their best work — sometimes through encouragement and sometimes through fear”.
The production of The Thief and the Cobbler would take a turn after Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of Williams most recognized and acclaimed works.
The Fanta soda commercials that Williams developed with Chris Knott got to the attention of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, one of the most remarked directors and producers of the US. They showed kids playing soccer and interacting with Mickey, Goofy, Donald Duck and Pluto with the same technique applied in Roger Rabbit.
Williams’ secret was to animate on ones — that is, one drawing for each frame — on perspective. On the shootings, the actors would interact with points of reference so that their eyes would be turned to the characters’ eyes or with mechanical arms and objects that were manipulated by puppeteers. In the process of animation, the characters were inserted on top of the references. The commercials also counted with a process called aerial image, developed by Chris Knott. This technique consists on inserting shadows and tonalities in animated characters that interact on a live action environment.
Very well impressed by those commercials, director Robert Zemeckis, 65, who had just finished shooting “Back to the Future” (1985, Universal Pictures), recruited Williams to assume the seat of director of animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He imposed three conditions: the animation should have the versatility and articulation of Disney, the characters should look like they were made by Warner Bros and the humor should be similar but no so brutal as the Tex Avery (1908–1980) short-films, who worked in Tom and Jerry (1940, Hanna Barbera).
The schedule was unyielding. According to Nik Ranieri, approximately 75% of all the film’s animation was completed in 6 to 7 months. The three-minute opening sequence took half the production time to be made. The film was an instant success and raised more than US$300 million worldwide according the Box Office Mojo, a website that collects cinema’s statistic data. The film also won 4 Oscars, two of those awarded to Williams: one for Best Visual Effects, and an Honorary Award for the achievements in the use of animation for this film.
With the success of Roger Rabbit, Williams got US$50 million from Warner Bros to produce and distribute The Thief and the Cobbler. A light in the end of the tunnel finally came up for the endless production of the film. But the animator could not fit to the deadlines established by the studio. According to the documentary Persistence of Vision, Williams didn’t even completed the film’s storyboard, the sequence of illustrations that pre-visualizes the entire film in order to design the production. In 1992 he was called to the Warner Bros’ head office in Los Angeles to exhibit the film. But approximately 85% of the film was completed. The delays and the budget overflow displeased the investors and Williams was fired from his own film. With that, his studio closed its doors.
The Thief and the Cobbler would then be finished by Fred Calvert and released in 1993 under the title The Princess and the Cobbler. Eventually, Miramax — Disney’s subsidiary at the time — bought the rights of the film and made their own version, changing the name for Arabian Knights. Both versions were badly received by critics and the audience. Throughout the years new versions of the film were released, made by independent artists who seeked to do justice for Williams’ work. In 2013 The Thief and the Cobbler was preserved by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
After the bumping ride with The Thief and the Cobbler, Williams came back to Canada and lived five years with his wife in an island. But he didn’t missed the taste of learning. He came back to study drawing and re-approached the students. He decided to conjoin everything he had learned with the great masters of animation — as well with some of his students. He than wrote what is considered today an obligatory bibliography for anyone who wants to work in the field: The Animator’s Survival Kit.
Williams spent the rest of his life dedicated to education and giving lectures about animation worldwide. With clear and easy to understand language, he meticulously describes all the process of animation and tells stories of his experiences with animators such as Ken Harris, Milt Kahl (1909–1987) — Disney animator of films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Jungle Book (1967) — , Grim Natwick (1890–1990) — also an animator for Snow White and A Christmas Carol, and Art Babbitt. His achievements are so charmingly described that the impression is that he is in fact having a conversation with the reader.
In the last years of his life, Williams recovered an idea he had since he was 15 years-old: to adapt Aristophanes’ (411 BC) play Lysistrata into a feature film. Williams took almost six decades to develop the project because he believed he didn’t have the necessary manual abilities to conceive it.
In 2015, as a prologue for his film, he released the short-film Prologue. He presents to the audience a continuous conflict between four warriors, without cut, and with a drawing line that distows from all of his previous works. There is a saying that animation should do what a camera can’t do. Williams took this saying kind of in the literal way.
“I was thunderstruck when I watched it”, said animator Rosana Urbes, director of the short-film Guida (2014, RR Filmes de Animação) in an exclusive interview for LabJor FAAP. For her, the film “could only have been made in animation, with a flawless animation anatomy design and an impeccable animation”.
Exhibited in Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2015, Prologue was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short-Film in 2016, and became Williams’ latest published material.
The animator passed away on August of 2019, at 86 years of age, while he was still producing his feature-film. His wife and daughter stated he worked at least seven hours a day, every day of the week. And not didn’t even stopped working on the day he died.
André Barroso, 21, is a former Animation student from FAAP.
To access the original article in Portuguese, click here.
