No. 194: Richard Williams, 1933-2019

Richard Williams Passes

It was with shock that I read of the death of Richard Williams last week, just after I had posted about him (No. 193: Page One-eleven). He was 86 years old, but that doesn't lessen the regret I felt for his absence from the 2D animation world; he loomed larger than anyone in his reverence and enthusiasm for drawn animation, and for all that he did to try to sustain it and make it into a noble art.

We have his great book, The Animator's Survival Kit, and we have the instructional DVD collection that he created afterwards, and we have all his films and drawings to treasure and learn from, and though I am given to understand that he could be difficult to work with, he made a great positive impact on animators around the world. His work will continue to inspire and stimulate for decades to come, I am sure.

Richard Williams as he looked in his early forties.

What we don't have is the completed feature film that he had dedicated so much of his life to, the ill-fated The Thief and the Cobbler, which was taken out of his hands and then "completed" by a crew that had no sense of what the project could be. Yet still, the incomplete version (The Thief Recobbled) that we do have is a marvel to see.