When the animator Richard Williams celebrated his 80th birthday last month he was the subject of widespread and heartfelt acclaim as one of the most important and influential figures in his industry. His career has ranged from tiny TV commercials to the biggest budget Hollywood features, including the 1988 homage to the golden age of animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film widely credited with single-handedly reinvigorating an art form that had fallen badly out of fashion.
Looking back over his many triumphs – as well as some notable disasters – Williams himself ascribes much of his success to a decision he made in the late 1960s, when he effectively demoted himself within his own, highly profitable and multi-award-winning, company. At that time, on the other side of the Atlantic, some of the great animators of the 1930s and 40s were beginning to retire. And as Disney and Warner Bros dispensed with their services, Williams began to hire them. Over the next few decades he would be both boss and assistant to the likes of Milt Kahl, creator of Shere Kahn, the tiger in Disney's Jungle Book; Art Babbitt of Goofy fame; and Grim Natwick, who animated most of Snow White as well as creating Betty Boop.
His first hire was Ken Harris – Bugs Bunny et al – "arguably the best of the lot", says Williams. "He was Chuck Jones's top man and you could somehow spot a Ken Harris scene. He just drew slightly funnier than anyone else." Appropriately, their first meeting began with a laugh. "The doors of the elevator opened and as he stepped out I just couldn't help myself," says Williams. "'Yeah, yeah', Harris said, 'I look like the Coyote.' And he did. Chuck Jones had modelled it on him."
Over the next few decades Williams and his dream teams of animators were involved in some of the most distinctive and successful work of the period. Their 1972 version of A Christmas Carol won an Oscar and a TV special, Ziggy's Gift, picked up an Emmy. In Hollywood Williams provided the opening sequences to the Pink Panther movies as well as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which resulted in him being awarded another two Academy Awards.
But perhaps it is two other projects that will ultimately best define their relationship; one that succeeded and one that failed. The failure was The Thief and the Cobbler, a feature length animation inspired by the Sufi folk tales that obsessed Williams throughout his career. From the mid 60s he had channelled vast amounts of time and money, as well as the expertise of his collaborators, into realising his ambition of producing the best animated film ever made. After many false dawns he was eventually removed from his own project by his backers in the early 90s. But out of this devastating wreckage emerged an unexpected triumph.
Williams collected together all that he had learned over the years and hosted a series of animation masterclasses that eventually led to the 2001 publication of The Animator's Survival Kit, a book that become the definitive teaching aid for a new generation of both students and practitioners. Five years ago the book was reworked into a set of DVDs and this month it is launched as an iPad app.
"The DVDs were an obvious development to show movement," he explains. "But an app is really made for it. We've included new films, we've been able to break down the lessons differently, and just being able to manipulate the drawings backwards and forward to see exactly how you get from here to there is quite a thing. This will be a tool for people to study animation, and also something they can actually use at their desk."
Although Williams's reverence for the classic craft skills of the early animators is at the heart of his work, he has long been seen as the link between the golden age of hand-drawn animation and the digital present. It was a connection recognised in one of his early masterclasses when 12 animators from Pixar unexpectedly enrolled. "They'd just finished making Toy Story, although it hadn't yet been released, so no one was yet aware of the impact it would have. I knew it was the first computer generated feature film and so I felt obliged to tell them that I knew nothing about computers. They said that wasn't why they'd enrolled, and at the end of the course they said that 90% of what I talked about applied to them. Sometimes it looks as if everything has changed, when in fact not that much has changed at all."
Williams was born in Canada in 1933 and brought up in Toronto. His mother was an illustrator, who had herself once been offered a job at Disney. "She took me to see Snow White when I was five and said that I was never the same again. Not that I was scared like all the other children who thought the creatures were real," he says. "I knew they were drawings, and that's what fascinated me." Aged 14, Williams actually visited the Disney studios and met Walt, "which you'd think would be a clear memory, but I only have the vaguest recollection".
After his Disney experience he threw himself into art, which led him, for a time, away from animation. "In a gallery I saw a room full of Rembrandts, burst into tears and said 'screw animation, this was the real thing'." After art school he travelled to Spain where he set himself up as artist. "It was so cheap to live that I could survive for a year by selling just one painting. But I didn't really want to do portraits for industrialists wives. And although I had persuaded myself that the trouble with animation was that you can't get good drawings into it, I really wanted to try, and the animation sort of snuck up on me. I found myself doing these tiny little storyboard things and thinking about this idea for a film about three idealists."
In the mid 1950s Williams moved to London to work on what would become his Bafta winning The Little Island, which he funded by working for newly launched commercial television companies. "When the Mr Magoo people came over to make some ads I started with them as a paint mixer, within six months I was animating and within another six months I was directing. And that's been my life ever since, doing the commercial work so as to buy time in which I could try to stretch the medium with my own work."
He describes The Little Island as "a half hour philosophical discussion, and very much a young man's film. It took me three and half years to make and early on I went to see Bambi and thought, what a load of saccharine nonsense. I went to see it again as I was finishing The Little Island and came out on my hands and knees. As has happened so many times since, I realised I didn't know beans. How did they ever do that? The answer was that Milt Kahl, and all those other great people, were working on it."
When Williams first visited Hollywood he says he was far more intimidated by the back room animators than he was when encountering film stars. "They did have a loyalty to one another, but also a real toughness. Peter Ustinov was once asked about working at Disney and the first thing he remembered was 'all those old guys tearing each other apart'."
Williams said he had been working with Ken Harris for seven years before Harris told him, "maybe you could be an animator". "By this time I was well over 40, had the leading studio in Europe and had won over a hundred international awards. It wasn't until I was nearly 50 that he said I could be a good animator. But he was right in that you never know what you don't know. And that's why working with these guys was so beneficial. Art Babbitt was a natural teacher. I had so much money coming in from commercials that we closed the studio for a month and he just gave class after class. It was tremendously exciting as he was giving us all the cliches they had worked out in the 30s. It was a strange way to run a company, and it was even sillier that I invited the competition to sit in on these classes, but in the end it did produce something of a blossoming of English animation."
Perhaps the culmination of this approach was the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Williams says he had two thoughts when he stood on the podium holding his brace of Oscars. "One was about my mother. She was a really good animator, so I sort of did her career for her. My other thought was, 'now I'll get the money for 'The Thief'."
Money was raised, but it was never enough, and when Williams was eventually removed from the project the rights were owned by different people in different parts of the world and versions of it were completed using other animators. Williams has declined to see them. "I'm not interested, but my son, who is also an animator, did tell me that if I ever want to jump off a bridge then I should take a look."
The failure was a huge personal and professional blow to Williams, who retreated to an island off Vancouver with his wife, Mo. "I did get a couple of really good offers from Hollywood, but I thought if I couldn't get The Thief through, which had real commercial power as well as being something I'd always wanted to make, there was no point. And when you've suffered defeat like that you need to get off the battlefield." It was in Vancouver that he began his masterclasses. He and Mo later moved back to the UK where they worked together on the book, the DVDs and now the app. They live in Bristol and have an office in the Aardman studios, where the Wallace and Gromit films are made. It is where Williams has planted his animator's sloping desk from the Disney studios – "Walt bought a lot of them when the money started to come in after Snow White, and they still work" – and where he is currently engaging with both his past and his future.
He and Mo are taking advantage of technical advances to digitally restore his archives. He is also working on a new "big film" ("the subtitle is: 'will I live to finish it'"). He says he is in excellent health despite a heart bypass operation a few years ago. As a thank you to his medical team, he animated some graffiti by Banksy – another Bristol artist – for his doctors to show at a medical conference. In it Banksy's masked rioter suffers a heart attack while throwing a bunch of flowers, "and my doctors said it was the most authentic heart attack they had seen. But I should also say that he gets better by the end of the cartoon."
An early beneficiary of the restoration programme is a film of circus performers, which Williams began when he was just 20, later put to music composed by a young Richard Rodney Bennett. "The great thing about digital is that it can open up the work in completely new ways, not least in terms of distribution. A long time ago I was asked by one of the great guys at Disney how I could survive without a Disney helping me. They knew that what they did would not have been possible without him, and it's true that I never did have a Disney and it's also true that I got screwed. If I did things again I would be wiser, but you get wise too late. I was so interested in the work that it blinded me to what was going on. And the work is just so damn fascinating you feel as if nothing else matters."
He is reluctant to say too much about what "the big film" is about – "we had so much publicity about The Thief and then it went wrong" – but says it is being made in chapters – "so if I do drop dead we will still have something" – and that a six minute prologue, which will be a short film in its own right, will soon be ready. "What I'm interested in is that nobody has been able to handle realism. It's just been embarrassing. So I'm doing graphic realism, these things are obviously drawings, but it will go into adult territory and will combine different styles. I want something that will be grim, but also funny and salacious and sexy. I can't tell you how excited I am by it. No one has been able to do this and I know that I can. All I need is some time and five or six assistants who can draw like hell."
