Richard Williams (animator)

Richard Williams (animator)

Richard Williams (born March 19, 1933 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian-British animator. He is best known for serving as animation director on Disney/Amblin's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and for his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator; his most famous works in this field included the title sequences to What's New, Pussycat? (1965) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). He also animated the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films.

Richard Williams emigrated from Toronto to Ibiza in 1953 and then to London in 1955. In 1958 he produced the work that boosted his career and won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Animated Film, The Little Island. In the Thames Television documentary "The Thief Who Never Gave Up", broadcast in the late 1980s, Williams credits 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... a barter system". After his noted work in the mid-1960s he went on to direct the Academy Award-winning A Christmas Carol (1971), the full-length feature Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) and the Emmy-winning telefilm Ziggy's Gift (1982). He also served as director of animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), winning two more Oscars for his work. He has written an acclaimed animation how-to book, The Animator's Survival Kit, published in 2002 (expanded edition, 2009). Following this, he completed a 9 minute short film titled Circus Drawings. The silent film, with live accompaniment, premiered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010.