Richard Williams, 1933-2019

While I was away on vacation in Portland last week, I got the news that acclaimed animator Richard Williams passed away - while he was most famous for being the animation director on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", he was also known for animating title sequences for 1960's title sequences for films like "Casino Royale", "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", and two of the "Pink Panther" films starring Peter Sellers.  Then, of course, there was "The Thief and the Cobbler", a monumental piece of animation that he worked on for over twenty years, which got shelved in 1992 over fears of competition from the similarly-themed Disney film, "Aladdin".

I bumped into Richard for the first time at the 2015 Telluride Festival, where he was showing his new short film, "Prologue", essentially it was an excerpt from a planned feature version of "Lysistrata", the famous play by Aristophanes in which Greek women end a war by refusing to have sex with their warrior husbands.

We got to hang out in that wonderful mountaintop festival, and I felt like I was on top of the world.  Unfortunately, I didn't like "Prologue" so much - it was very stiff and looked rotoscoped, which was too bad because Richard was famous for his exaggeration and stylization.  Still, the film won a lot of awards, even an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short.  So now that will have to stand on its own as his final film, and the rest of that feature will, like "The Thief and the Cobbler", never be completed.

with Richard Williams in Telluride, Sept. 2015

We encountered each other again at the Annecy Animation Festival in 2018.  He was a great artist and a great friend.  I'm so sorry such a witty, talented and energetic guy is gone.

with Richard Williams in Annecy, June 2018

--Bill P.