Richard Williams (animator)

Williams was born in Toronto, Ontario, the only son of the commercial illustrator Kathleen "Kay" Bell (1909–1998) and Leslie Lane (1905–1993), a London-born painter and photographic retoucher.

Lane left when Williams was a baby, and he was adopted by his stepfather, Kenneth D C Williams (1910–2003), an advertising executive who worked for Brigdens, a printing and design company in Toronto.

Williams grew up on Golfdale Road, a suburban street in Toronto, where he and his childhood friend Martin Hunter put on magic shows and comedy acts for the local neighbourhood: "We collected $16.25, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice".

Williams' mother Kay was an accomplished illustrator whose work was inspired by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Kay read her son the stories of the Arabian Nights, which would later inspire his magnum opus The Thief and the Cobbler.

"Kay introduced us to The Thief of Baghdad with its flying carpets, magical horses and wicked viziers".

Richard Edmund Williams (March 19, 1933 – August 16, 2019) was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter.

At the age of five, Kay took her son to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a film which made a "tremendous impression" on him.

Later he would quote his mother as saying to him, "You saw ‘Snow White’ when you were 5, and you were never the same."

Williams was educated at the Northern Secondary School, Toronto, then known as the Northern Technical School.

One of his classmates, Lars Thompson, recalled: "Under the name of Ivan Yurpee, [Dick] played a trumpet in a band of fellow zanies. In class, he would sketch our teachers with an animator's sure touch, and without detection".

At age 15, Williams travelled to Hollywood from Toronto on a five-day bus trip, where he took the Disney studio tour three days running, each day breaking away from the guide to seek out the studio animators and being ejected from the studio lot.

He was finally invited to meet the animators, who showed him how the Disney animation process worked, after his mother contacted a friend who worked for Disney.

"I always wanted, when I was a kid, to get to Disney. I was a clever little fellow so I took my drawings and I eventually got in. They did a story on me, and I was in there for two days, which you can imagine what it was like for a kid."

With help from his stepfather, Williams was already earning a living as a commercial artist at age 17, creating advertisements for companies such as Dr. Ballard's Pet Food.

After graduating from high school, Williams enrolled in the advertising program at the Ontario College of Art.

He did not receive a diploma, however, as he changed his course of study to join the fine arts program after his third year.

In the mid-1950s, fellow Canadian Jacques Konig was studying at the University of London: "Dick did not play his cornet and lead his band just for the love of music, it was a significant and necessary contribution to his income. In my role as student president of the University of London's Chelsea College and Chelsea Arts School (1956–57), I booked his hard-driving traditional jazz band for many of our events, and we knew all his available cash was being used to finance his hand-drawn and highly imaginative short film".

In 1953, Williams saw an exhibition of paintings by Rembrandt and was "moved to tears".

For a time, he "lost all interest in animation".

He left Canada and settled in Ibiza, where he lived for two years and became a painter, finding inspiration in the clowns and performers at a local circus.

In 1955, Williams left Ibiza and moved to England, where he began working at fellow Canadian George Dunning's company, T.V. Cartoons Ltd., working mainly on television commercials.

He also began developing his own animated short film, The Little Island, during this period.

Williams later explained that he was drawn back to the craft of animation because his "paintings were trying to move" and he "couldn't stand the idea of doing paintings for rich industrialists’ wives, and that whole art world was just repulsive as a way of life".

In 1958, Williams completed The Little Island, the film that launched his career, telling the story of three men on a desert island; each representing a single virtue: truth, beauty, and good.

The film won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film.

The critical and financial success of Williams's next short, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962), which was narrated by Kenneth Williams, enabled him to establish his own company, Richard Williams Animation Ltd. He made the short film A Lecture on Man that same year.

Richard Williams Animation Ltd. eventually completed over 2,500 TV commercials, and won numerous awards, at its home at 13 Soho Square in Soho, London.

Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films.

In 1965, he made the short film The Dermis Probe, and also animated the title sequences to What's New Pussycat? (1965).

In 1966, he animated the titles for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award.

He was also a film title sequence designer and animator.

In the 1983 Thames Television documentary The Thief Who Never Gave Up, Williams credited animator Bob Godfrey with giving him his start in the business: "Bob Godfrey helped me...I worked in the basement and would do work in kind, and he would let me use the camera...[it was] a barter system".

A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app.

From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.

These sketches would eventually become the short film Circus Drawings, completed over 50 years later, in 2010.

While in Ibiza, Williams played in a jazz band; his passion for the cornet would be an enduring one, and he would lead several bands over the years, inspired by the music of Bix Beiderbecke.

In Ibiza, Williams began to draw storyboards for an animated film about three misguided idealists.