Richard Edmund Williams
Richard Edmund Williams is a
Canadian–British animator best known as animation director on Disney/Amblin's
Who Framed ‘Roger Rabbit’ and for his unfinished feature film ‘The Thief and
the Cobbler’. He is 84 years old and was born on 19 March 1933 in Toronto,
Canada. Richard Williams
was a pioneer of hand-drawn animation. He spent most of his professional
life in the United Kingdom. In 1968, Williams began his career
work with Dunning, and then worked in the expanding television commercials
industry. His first film was The Little Island (1958).
The film's success enabled him to establish his own studio, which attracted
many animators to his perfectionist
approach. Richard
Williams’ parents were divorced when he was five, his mom Kathleen
(illustrator), as well as his other family of artists encouraged him to draw.
At fifteen, Richard went down to Burbank and stayed at the YMCA. There he
visited the Disney Studio, where he aspired to be a part of it. For work, he
drew for some advertisements for the Disney Advertising Department. At a young
age, Richard Williams moved from Canada to Spain to paint and study.
In 1955,
Williams had an idea for an animated film. England was the nearest English-speaking
country and he figured if he was going to animate he had better move there. He
spent the next three years making a film (the little island).
Artist’s
Style:
William’s
used traditional animation for all his work and was another baseline for
animators today. Williams made a book called ‘the animator’s survival kit’
where he demonstrates how drawings can really create an amazing story with all
the right animation and finishing touches. These DVD's are for professionals
and students and cover the knowledge of the principles of sophisticated
animation which apply to any style or approach to the medium, including
computer, classical, games, stop motion and internet animation.
The thief and the Cobbler is a hand-animated epic inspired by the
Arabian Nights and was begun in 1964 and was initially self-funded. 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. However, the production
went over deadline, and in 1992, with only 15 minutes left to complete, The
Completion Bond Company, who had insured Warner’s financing of the film, feared
competition from the similarly themed Disney film Aladdin and seized the
project from Williams in Camden, London.
For a long time, Williams preferred not to discuss the film. Originally, it
was supposed to have mute characters and be a series of shot. [2] ‘There remains
some beautiful animation in this fractured version of Richard Williams' epic;
these include the opening sequence, where The Thief and The Cobbler get tangled up with each other
and roll down the steps of the Cobbler's shop, interrupting Zig Zag's march
through the city, the chase through the palace through Escher-like optical
illusions, and a little of the final war machine sequence.’
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