Richard Williams (animator)

Rembrandt van Rijn - inspiration

In 1953, Williams saw an exhibition of paintings by Rembrandt and was "moved to tears".[5] For a time, he "lost all interest in animation".[12] He left Canada and settled in Ibiza, where he lived for two years and became a painter,[3] finding inspiration in the clowns and performers at a local circus. These sketches would eventually become the short film Circus Drawings, completed over 50 years later, in 2010.[5] While in Ibiza, Williams played in a jazz band; his passion for the cornet would be an enduring one and he would lead several bands over the years, inspired by the music of Bix Beiderbecke.[8]

In Ibiza, Williams began to draw storyboards for an animated film about three misguided idealists. In 1955, Williams left Ibiza and moved to England, where he began working at fellow Canadian George Dunning's company, T.V. Cartoons Ltd., working mainly on television commercials. He also began developing his own animated short film, The Little Island, during this period.[3] Williams later explained that he was drawn back to the craft of animation because his "paintings were trying to move"[7] and he "couldn’t stand the idea of doing paintings for rich industrialists’ wives, and that whole art world was just repulsive as a way of life".[13]

In the 1983 Thames Television documentary The Thief Who Never Gave Up, Williams credited animator Bob Godfrey with giving him his start in the business: "Bob Godfrey helped me...I worked in the basement and would do work in kind, and he would let me use the camera...[it was] a barter system".[14]

In the mid-1950s fellow Canadian Jacques Konig was studying at the University of London: "Dick did not play his cornet and lead his band just for the love of music, it was a significant and necessary contribution to his income. In my role as student president of the University of London's Chelsea College and Chelsea Arts School (1956-57), I booked his hard-driving traditional jazz band for many of our events, and we knew all his available cash was being used to finance his hand-drawn and highly imaginative short film".[15]

In 1958 Williams completed The Little Island, the film that launched his career, telling the story of three men on a desert island; each representing a single virtue: truth, beauty, and good.[8] The film won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film.[16]

Soho Square in 1992. Richard Williams Animation is the green building to the right of the mock Tudor structure.

Williams' drawings for The Charge of the Light Brigade were inspired by contemporary cartoon illustrations

The critical and financial success of Williams's next short, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962), which was narrated by Kenneth Williams, enabled him to establish his own company, Richard Williams Animation Ltd.[17] He made the short film A Lecture on Man that same year.[18] Richard Williams Animation Ltd. eventually completed over 2,500 TV commercials, and won numerous awards, at its home at 13 Soho Square in Soho, London.[5][14]

In 1965 he made the short film The Dermis Probe,[19] and also animated the title sequences to What's New Pussycat? (1965). In 1966 he animated the titles for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Also in 1966 a television documentary, The Creative Person, was made about his life and work. In 1967 he completed the short film The Sailor and the Devil, mainly animated by the illustrator Errol Le Cain,[20] and also animated the title sequence for Casino Royale.[13]

In 1968 his studio won accolades for the animated segments in Tony Richardson's epic feature film about the Crimean War, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968),[21] which Williams described as "the best job I ever had". Film critic Vincent Canby described Williams' work as “marvelous animated line drawings, done in the style of patriotic mid-19th-century cartoons".[8]

In the mid-1960s Williams began work on the personal project that he intended to be “the best animated feature ever”, based on the tales of Mulla Nasrudin, and initially titled Nasrudin. The project evolved over time and in 1973 he would settle on a new story and title, The Thief and the Cobbler.[5]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Williams hired and brought to London a number of the great Hollywood animators from the 1930s, elderly men who were by then nearing retirement. These included Art Babbitt (Goofy), Grim Natwick (Betty Boop), and Ken Harris (Wile E. Coyote). Babbitt, in particular, gave masterclasses at 13 Soho Square, training a new generation of animators.[5]

Following the 1967 release of Disney's The Jungle Book, Williams first met master animator Milt Kahl, with whom he would become friends. Kahl had animated Shere Khan, the tiger, and Williams knelt down to polish his shoes. But Kahl said to him: “You can stop cleaning my shoes because you draw better than I do; but then you can clean them some more because you can’t animate.”[5]

TV commercials provided Richard Williams Animation with its main source of income. Although Williams despised the form, director Clive Donner persuaded him to raise his game. Following a successful commercial for Guinness beer, set in London's Royal Albert Hall, which won multiple awards, William's studio became well known for commercials, bringing characters such as Cresta Bear to life.[13]

In 1971 Williams directed the Academy Award-winning A Christmas Carol, an animated adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella.[22] The design of the film was based upon the original 1843 engravings.[8] A Christmas Carol was broadcast on U.S. television by ABC on December 21, 1971, and released theatrically soon after. In 1972, it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.[23]

In around 1973 Williams fell out with his business partners over the feature film Nasruddin, and began to re-imagine the story, which soon morphed into a new tale about a mute thief who is obsessed with stealing three golden balls which protect an ancient city from invasion.[13] Williams animated many of the scenes himself, and spent years perfecting a single scene in which the villainous vizier ZigZag shuffles a deck of cards.[13]

In 1975 Williams animated the title credits for Blake Edwards' Return of the Pink Panther,[24] and in 1976 his studio completed the animated credits for The Pink Panther Strikes Again.[25] Art Babbitt, who was working for Williams at the time, described his employer's talent: "He's a director, designer, animator, and has a good layman's knowledge of music. He's a dreamer. He has more to learn as far as animation is concerned, but God, he can draw like a bastard".[26]

In 1976 Williams did the illustrations for Idries Shah's English translation of the stories of Nasrudin, titled The Exploits of the Incomparable Mullah Nasruddin.[27]

In 1977 Williams directed the full-length animated feature film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), in which his daughter Claire played the part of Marcella.[28]

Richard Williams Animation in 1985

Richard Williams at the 100 Club with his band DixSix in 1985

In 1982, Williams directed Ziggy's Gift, a television special in which Ziggy takes a job as a sidewalk Santa.[8] The film won an Emmy Award,[8] and in the same year he appeared in a Thames Television documentary titled Richard Williams and The Thief Who Never Gave Up.[29]

In 1987 Williams embarked on his biggest project to date, becoming animation director on the Disney/Spielberg film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Williams was initially reluctant to work on the film, did not want to move to Los Angeles, so production was moved to London. When pitched the idea, Williams said to executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis "I just hate animation and live-action together; it just doesn't work, it's ugly".[30]

Disney and Spielberg promised Williams that in return for doing the film, they would help finance and distribute the still-unfinished The Thief and the Cobbler. Williams designed the characters for the film, including Jessica Rabbit. He said of Jessica that she was "the ultimate male fantasy, drawn by a cartoonist.[3] I tried to make her like Rita Hayworth; we took her hair from Veronica Lake, and Zemeckis kept saying, 'What about the look Lauren Bacall had?'"[3] Blessed with tremendous energy, Williams barely slept and worked through multiple nights to get the animation finished on time.[3]

In 1988 another documentary was released about Williams, titled I Drew Roger Rabbit.[31] In 1989, following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams won two more Academy Awards for his work, a joint award for Best Special Effects, shared with Ken Ralston, Ed Jones and George Gibbs[3] and a Special Achievement Award.[32] Williams said "I'm (in) the same business as Goya and Rembrandt. I may be rotten at it with nothing of the same quality or talent, but that's my business".[33]

Apart from animation, Williams's great passion was Dixieland jazz. He led an ensemble in London named Dix Six that played regular gigs at venues such as the PizzaExpress Jazz Club, The 100 Club, and the Britannia Hotel in Grosvenor Square.[3]

Richard Williams' magnum opus, a painstakingly hand-animated epic inspired by the Arabian Nights and with the production title The Thief and the Cobbler, was begun in 1964 and was initially self-funded. As a largely non-verbal feature meant for an adult audience, The Thief was dismissed at first as unmarketable. After over twenty years of work, Williams had completed only twenty minutes of the film, and following the critical success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams sought and secured a production deal with Warner Bros. in 1988. However, the production went over deadline, and in 1992, with only 15 minutes of footage left to complete, The Completion Bond Company, who had insured Warners' financing of the film, feared competition from the similarly themed Disney film Aladdin, which was scheduled to open on the same day, and seized the project from Williams in Camden, London.[34]

Completion Bond then had animator Fred Calvert supervise the animation process in Korea. New scenes were also animated to include several musical interludes. Calvert's version was released in South Africa and Australia in 1993 as The Princess and the Cobbler. Miramax (which was owned by Disney at the time) then acquired rights to the project and extensively rewrote and re-edited the film to include continuous dialogue, as well as many cuts to lengthy sequences. Miramax's product was released in North America in 1995 under the title Arabian Knight. For a long time, Williams preferred not to discuss the film in detail.

Following the collapse of The Thief, Williams closed his company and left the UK for his native Canada, moving with his wife Imogen and their two children to a house in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where the family lived for five years. To earn a living, Williams began to host animation masterclasses, in which he combined his skill as an animator with his talent on the stage, performing around 30 events around the world.[5]

In 1992 Williams was awarded an honourary doctorate by the Royal College of Art.[35] In 1997 Williams moved back to the UK, living first in Pembrokeshire and later moving to Bristol, where he would remain until the end of his life.[5]

Richard Williams at Aardman Animation in 2015, at work on Prologue.

The notes for Williams' masterclass formed the basis for a definitive book on the art of animation, and in 2002 Faber & Faber published Williams' acclaimed animation how-to book, The Animator's Survival Kit, with an "expanded edition" following in 2009. The book soon became a key reference for animators, both in print and later on as a DVD box set and an iPad application. The historian Kevin Brownlow described the ASK as “utterly riveting, even to a layman.”[8]

From 2008 Williams began to work as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked at one of his original 1938 Disney animation desks.[5] Aardman co-founder Peter Lord described Williams as exemplifying "pure creativity; he seemed to us to work without compromise and for the sheer love of his chosen art-form. No deadlines, except the ones he set himself, nobody to please or answer to, except himself. [He was] our special guest, our resident celebrity".[36]

Even in his 80s, Williams continued to work every day, and do a full day's work. He liked to enter his office at Aardman by the fire escape "just to avoid people".[8] Williams celebrated the creative freedom he enjoyed: "Nobody's going to call me — well, maybe [my] wife, ...nobody's going to walk in. I don't have to say hello to anybody. You know, I'm free."[8]

But his advice to aspiring film-makers could be bleak: "Persist," he told an audience at a screening of his work; "Keep going. Don't get stopped. Because they're going to stop you if they can."[8]

In 2010 Williams completed his 9-minute short film titled Circus Drawings, first begun in Ibiza in the early 1950s. The silent film, with live accompaniment, premiered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010.[37]

On December 10, 2013, the director's cut of The Thief and the Cobbler, a workprint of the film, subtitled "A Moment in Time", was screened in Los Angeles. Williams participated in the event.[38] However, a final, finished version of the film as Williams had long envisioned would never be completed.

In 2015 his short film Prologue received both an Oscar nomination[39] and a BAFTA nomination in the category of best animated short. Prologue was the first 6 minutes of his hand-drawn feature film Lysistrata, based on the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, which Williams joked should be sub-titled "Will I Live to Finish It?".[5] Williams described Prologue as "the only thing so far in my career that I’ve ever really been pleased with."[8] In 2013 Williams told The Guardian, "All I need is some time and five or six assistants who can draw like hell." The film was intended to be "grim but funny and salacious and sexy".[13] Like The Thief and the Cobbler, Prologue would never be completed. But, as Williams put it: "it's the doing of it that matters. Do it for the love of it. That's all there is".[33]