Williams was a renowned perfectionist: his formative use of perspective was matched by his meticulous attention to detail and general preference for animating “on the twos” (ie: 12 frames per second) or even “on the ones” (24 frames per second); most of Williams’s peers cut corners (and frames) by animating on the threes, four, or fives. Williams, working on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was also a pioneer in his use of multi-layered image-compositing (now mostly done digitally), as realized by Industrial Light and Magic (for more on that process, check out Cartoon Brew’s interview with Ed Jones, the supervisor of optical photography for “Roger Rabbit”).

Williams was also a pragmatist: he became an award-winning commercial artist in order to finance “The Thief and the Cobbler,” a project that he started developing in 1968. Richard Williams Animation, Williams’s London animation studio, would go on to win hundreds of awards after making thousands of animated advertisements, many of which can be seen on the expansive TheThiefArchive YouTube channel (as well as the animated sequences he produced for several live-action films’ opening credits, including “Return of the Pink Panther” and “Casino Royale”). Williams hated the modern “art world” (“I couldn't stand the idea of doing paintings for rich industrialists' wives"), but was convinced, after a 1963 conversation with British filmmaker Clive Donner, that he should apply as much sincerity and ingenuity as he could to his commercial work. You can also see Williams commiserating with his animators in “The Thief Who Never Gave Up,” when he recommends that they not spread themselves too thin: "If [the clients] won't give us the time, you have to drop the quality [of your work]. You just drop it. And drop it again."

"The Thief and the Cobbler"

Williams obviously did not take his own advice during the 24-plus-years-long production of “The Thief and the Cobbler,” which was seized from him in 1992 by Warner Brothers and a completion bond company, who would later re-sell the film’s raw materials to Miramax, who eventually released a drastically simplified version of the film under the title of “Arabian Knight.” That year, Williams also had to lay off a couple dozen of his own animators and shut down Richard Williams Animation.