The half-hour fable depicts three blinkered characters (looking a bit like Doctor Seuss critters) who are each obsessed with Good, Truth or Beauty to the exclusion of the others. His first ‘personal’ film was The Little Island (1958). Williams described living in London as a starving artist, “about a year of living on peanut butter and fish and chips and milk”, as he scrabbled for work. But in his teens, Williams encountered the art of Rembrandt and turned instead to illustration and painting.Įarly on, Williams worked for an established Canadian animator, George Dunning – future director of The Yellow Submarine (1968) – whom he followed to England in 1955. Unlike most children, Williams understood the film was made out of drawings his mother was a commercial illustrator. Born in Toronto in 1933, he saw Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), aged five.
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But Williams did live long enough to screen his mostly animated reconstruction of Thief to enthusiastic audiences, including at the BFI Southbank in 2014 and again in November 2018.Īlthough Williams spent most of his life in Britain, he was an expat from Canada. The Miramax-released film called The Thief and the Cobbler (aka Arabian Knight) which can be found on British DVD is a near-total ruin of Williams’s vision, cretinously ‘completed’ by other hands. Williams began working on a permutation of it in 1964 he was still endeavouring to make it in 1992, when it was taken away from him. Rather, it was work he took on to promote his real opus, The Thief and the Cobbler, animation’s great lost film. Roger Rabbit, though, was never Williams’s crowning achievement. Roger Rabbit with Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit Hoskins can be yanked up by his tie by the scarlet torch-singer sex-goddess Jessica Rabbit (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”) or he can be hurtled through Los Angeles in a taxi whose yellow bonnet is a yammering cartoon mouth. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film shows a discombobulated Bob Hoskins trudging a 1940s world where cartoon characters are real citizens. An extraordinary blend of live-action, classical animation and film noir, the film was a blockbuster, second only to Rain Man at the 1988 box office.
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By far Williams’s most visible work was for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), on which he was the animation director.
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His studio, Richard Williams Animation in London’s Soho Square, flooded small screens with outstanding animated TV commercials.īut such work, however meticulous, tends to be remembered subconsciously by audiences. Williams created a plethora of animated title sequences for live-action films, mostly comedies including two Pink Panther films.
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Outside that community, much of Williams’s work is little ‘known’ in the conventional sense of the word, though it would be recognised by viewers of several generations. Among animation fans and professionals, Richard Williams – who died on August 16 aged 86 – was acclaimed and beloved, a great artist and generous teacher.