Richard Williams dies at 86

Williams was the lead animator on Roger Rabbit, a technical and artistic masterwork. I'm gobsmacked how well it blends live action and animation every time I see it (Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how it was animated).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_VnHAy1Vdc

His passion project, though, was The Thief and the Cobbler: it was 30 years in the making. (And still, essentially, unfinished: the studio added a poorly-received voice over narration and cut important scenes. Everyone keeps hoping for a restored director's cut version that never seems to come. In the meantime, though, there's a fan "recobbled" cut available on Youtube.)

Its abstract, geometric backgrounds, inspired by Islamic art, are gorgeous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KGQ4PfQdTc

He did bold animated commercials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQzra89u5Yo

And wrote one of the bibles of animation:



I love this quote from the book about him seeing Bambi when he was just starting out in animation:



One of his precepts was that, ideally, if you have the money and the time, 2D animation should be animated one "ones": that is, with 24 drawings per second (much of western animation is done on "twos": 12 drawings a second, or one every other frame, and anime often goes even lower than that.) Williams liked to say that "life is animated on ones". (Not every animator agrees with this.)

He also, to not deify the dead, had a reputation for having a gigantic temper, and would constantly blow up at his employees.

On The Animation Podcast, animator Andreas Deja said: "He was just so passionate about animation. So crazed about it. If he didn't like what you did he would put you down and he wouldn't be very subtle about it. But if he loved something he would call in the cleaning lady: 'Look at this! Look at this! Have you ever seen anything like this?' He was just mad about it."

RIP