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THE GREAT SURVIVOR
THE GREAT SURVIVOR
When you’ve learned from the best of the best – among them, Disney’s leg- endary Milt Kahl and Art Babbitt, and Ken Harris of Bugs Bunny fame – there are two good ways to go.
One is to become a great animator in your own right, the other’s eventual- ly to pass on your accumulated knowl- edge to future generations in that increasingly fertile field.
Happily, Richard Williams has done both. Born in Canada but resident in the UK on and off since the mid Fifties, Williams’ subsequent career is a barometer of the best of British anima- tion for more than four decades ever since his acclaimed first film, The Little Island, in 1958.
There have been Oscars and BAFTAs for A Christmas Carol (1973) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1989), memorable titling on films like The Pink Panther and The Charge Of The Light Brigade, and many great commercials – earning more than 250 international awards in all.
Now, at 68, he has produced a lavish, 340-page, large format compendium of his art* which is based not just on received wisdom down the years but also on mas- ter classes Williams has been giving to professional and would-be animators around the world for the past six years.
Williams is often regarded as the link between the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Disney and the brave new world of computer generat-
ed animation.
But even he
was surprised when
at his first experi-
mental class in
Vancouver, eleven
of the best Pixar
animators turned
up soon after they’d
finished Toy Story.
“What are you
doing here?’ he asked them, adding, “I don’t know a thing about computer ani- mation.” And they told him it was because of “the principles I was dishing out, of which, they said, at least 95 per cent were extremely useful.”
Since then, companies like Disney, Industrial Light & Magic and Dreamworks have all had representa- tives at his three-day, twice-to-thrice- yearly gatherings.
The book, eventually hatched with the unfailing support of Mo, “my wife and co-conspirator”, really began as a present to his son, Alex, who had switched from the law to an increasing- ly distinguished career in animation.
Williams explains: “I had these 35 notebooks which first came about because as the old guys would tell me stuff I’d write it all down. Alex took all the notebooks and edited them for him- self, effectively to teach himself, to hone his own craft.
“I then decided to boil those 35 books down into ten of 100 pages each which I then gave to Alex too.
When Mo and I start- ed the master classes, we boiled them down still further into just three books to provide a
sort of structure for the course.”
After some dozen master classes, Mo
suggested to her husband that he should write the book: “Ten pounds of shit in a three pound bag,” he laughs,
adding with a sigh, “I thought it
would take a year but in fact it took three and a half – and went right down to the wire.”
The result is a wonderfully bespoke-looking volume
crammed with anecdotes, illustrations and doodles not to mention “lots of for- mulas, principles, clichés and devices. But the main thing I want to pass on,” says Williams, “is a way of thinking about animation in order to free the mind to do the best work possible.”
Williams, now based in Pembrokeshire, is inordinately proud of the book. One of the two best things “I’ve done until now,” he claims. The other, Williams’ buffs might not be sur- prised to hear, is his legendary magnum opus, The Thief And The Cobbler, an epic animation he worked on for more than 20 years before finally losing con- trol of the project in the early Nineties.
Any discussion of The Thief is these days “a very dodgy area,” but he adds, excitedly, there are Disney plans
afoot to reconstruct it. The extent of the reconstruction “depends on what we find in the vaults.”
Williams, who in the heady days of Roger Rabbit had some 230 people gathered
about him, is now happily back as he was when he started out five decades ago. “ I made my first film entirely alone. Now here I am again just with pencil and paper plus a very good video tester. That’s about it.”
And, yes, there is a new film in the offing: “Before we started the classes, I did a tremendous amount of research and preparation work on an idea I first had when I was 15.
“It’s very odd and I can’t really describe it, but it is full length and I will do it mostly alone. There are maybe two people in the world who can help me and I’ve asked one of them who’s scared but willing. I never thought I’d be good enough to ani- mate it. Maybe I’m good enough now,” he suggests. ■ Quentin Falk
*The Animator’s Survival Kit
(Faber. £30 hbk, £20 pbk)
Photos opposite page: Roy Boulting (Kobal Collection) Lynda La Plante and Sophie Balhetchet of Cougar Films
Photos this page: Richard Williams and
illustrations from his book, The Animator’s Survival Kit
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