Richard Williams

Richard Williams is best known as the director of animation for the Warner Brothers film, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit'. His real goal in life was to finish his own masterpiece, an independent full-length animated film called, 'The Thief and the Cobbler', and he only worked on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' to get money for finishing his own film. Williams worked for companies such as Disney and Warner Brothers in a number of roles - as assistant animator, animation director and just as an animator. Unfortunately, after working on ‘The Cobbler and the Thief’ for 26 years, it was never properly completed. Warner Brothers offered to fund the last stage but pulled out when Disney produced ‘Aladdin’. Eventually two disappointing versions, the Completion Bond Company’s ‘The Princess and the Cobbler’ and Disney subsidiary Miramax’s ‘Arabian Knight’ (both butchered by altering the voices and adding singing), were produced. Williams has subsequently stopped talking about ‘The Cobbler and the Thief’ in public for the past 14 years. He is now working on another feature animation, but is keeping it all hush-hush so that the content is not revealed. To all intents and purposes now, Williams is a very private person and he doesn’t have his own website. Williams said that the design of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' had come from his interest in Persian imagery and that he would draw some designs on just a scrap of paper whenever he got an idea. The element of Williams’ work that has always caught my eye is his knowledge of the principles of animation. He sought out the masters of animation to gain whatever insights he could from them, which was everything they knew about animation. Animators such as Chuck Jones (creator of Wile E. Coyote) and Ken Harris (animator of Bugs Bunny) were particularly influential. Williams can add life to a 2D character that can make anyone forget that the character is only a drawing on paper. In the closest to Williams’ original intention, the fan version of ‘The Cobbler and the Thief’ known as the ‘Recobbled’ version, the sheer beauty of the hand-drawn animations, the animated optical illusions, the stunning backgrounds and enchanting story, show Williams’ own film would have been a masterpiece.