Born: Richard Edmund Lane
Birthday: March 19, 1933
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Alma mater: Ontario College of Art
Occupation: Animator, Director
Years active: 2019-1946
Died: August 16, 2019

Born Richard Edmund Lane, he was adopted by his stepfather, Kenneth D. C. Williams and grew up in suburban Toronto. Richard was deeply impressed by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the age of 5.

At 15, Williams took a five-day bus trip to Hollywood where he took the Disney studio tour three days in a row, and every day he slipped away from the tour to find and talk to the animators. Every day he was caught and ejected from the studio lot. Eventually, his mother called a friend who worked for Disney and arranged for Richard to have a two day tour to see how the Disney animation process worked and to meet the animators.

Williams was already working as a commercial artist by age 17, creating ads for companies. He attended the Ontario College of Art’s advertising program, but after three years of study, Richard transferred to the fine arts program.

He left Canada for Ibiza, Spain to become a painter for two years, however, he drifted back to animation over time and began drawing storyboards for an animated film idea., Williams moved to England In 1955 to work at George Dunning’s T.V. Cartoons Ltd. on television commercials and to develop his own animated short, The Little Island.

Richard completed The Little Island three years later, earning the 1958 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film.

Williams’s next short, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me in 1962, was successful enough for him to launch his own company, Richard Williams Animation Ltd. That same year, Richard turned out his next animated short, A Lecture on Man. He funded his films by producing animated television commercials for which he became very well known.

He and his studio made the short films, The Dermis Probe and Sailor and the Devil, and animated the title sequences for movies like What’s New Pussycat?, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and 1965’s Casino Royale. He received critical praise for his work for both the title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade. It was during this same period he began work on a project based on the tales of Mulla Nasrudin, which would eventually evolve to become The Thief and the Cobbler.

Throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s Richard hired a number of the great Hollywood animators from the 1930s to teach his studio’s staff. Men like Art Babbitt, Grim Natwick, and Ken Harris gave masterclasses at Richard Williams Animation Ltd. Additionally, he met and befriended master animator Milt Kahl.

His productions increased as Williams directed an animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1971, earning him his first Academy Award. He animated the title credits for Blake Edwards’ Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, and again for 1976’s The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and in 1977 Richard directed the animated feature Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. Williams even earned an Emmy Award for his direction of the television special, Ziggy’s Gift in 1982 before taking on his most ambitious project, directing the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In exchange for Williams’ work on the film, Disney and Spielberg promised they would help finance and distribute his The Thief and the Cobbler. Richard worked night and day to get Roger Rabbit’s animation finished on schedule, and the movie won two Academy Awards in 1989.

Although begun in 1964 and with over twenty years of work, Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler only had twenty minutes of completed animation to show for it. With his fame for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he made a production deal with Warner Bros. in 1988. Williams went over deadline in 1992 and his film was taken from him and completed in Korea without his input or direction.

Richard closed his studio after thirty years of production, over 2,500 TV commercials, and numerous awards. He returned to Canada; combining his skill as an animator with his stage talent to make a living by holding animation masterclasses around the world.

Williams moved back to the UK in 1997. He wrote an animation how-to book based on the lessons of his masterclass, The Animator’s Survival Kit, published in 2002.

From 2008 on, Aardman Animations hosted Richard as an artist in residence where he continued to work every day, and do a full day’s work without deadlines or oversight. His residency allowed him to complete Circus Drawings in 2010, the 9-minute silent short film he began in Ibiza six decades earlier.

Finally, his short film, Prologue received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the category of best animated short in 2015. Prologue was only the first six minutes of his planned hand-drawn feature film Lysistrata. Richard Williams passed away before he could see it to completion.