Richard Williams, an acclaimed animator known for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, passed away at his home on Friday, August 16, 2019 at the age of 86, following a battle with cancer.
Williams was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1933, and later moved to England as a young adult. He had been educated at the Ontario College of Art, and began working as a commercial artist as a teenager. He mostly worked on television commercials in the 1950s, and in ’58 he produced The Little Island, which won the BAFTA Award for Animated Film that year.
In 1964, Williams began work on The Thief and the Cobbler, a completely hand-animated epic film inspired by Arabian Nights. However, as the film was mostly non-verbal and intended for an adult audience, Williams found it difficult to get the film financed in order to enter full production, and after working on it on and off for 20 years, he had only finished 20 minutes of the film. Warner Bros. eventually agreed to finance and distribute the project, but negotiations broke down when the film went over budget and missed deadlines. Eventually, 31 years after work began on it, the film was distributed (albeit heavily edited without Williams’ input) in 1993. Upon release, it was the last film to feature Kenneth Williams (who passed in 1988), Sir Anthony Quayle (who passed in 1989), and Vincent Price (who passed a month after the film’s release).
His work also included numerous well-known title sequences for live-action films, including those for What’s New Pussycat?, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Return of the Pink Panther, and The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
Williams’ best-known work is on 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a film on which he served as animation director. He also helped create the film versions of Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit. The film won multiple Academy Awards that year, for Best Sound Effects, Best Visual Effects, and Best Film Editing; Williams himself received a Special Achievement Academy Award for “animation direction and creation of the cartoon characters.”
In addition to continuing to work on animation until his last years, Williams also produced The Animator’s Survival Kit, a “how to” book for the craft.
