BETTY BOOP DRAWING HOLDING THINGS SERIES
At 16, Williams had a personal epiphany after looking at a series of Rembrandt paintings: “I suddenly understood what all this art stuff was all about” he recalls in a 1982 made-for-TV documentary called “ Richard Williams: The Thief Who Never Gave Up.” For Williams, there wasn’t a huge difference between what Rembrandt did with oil paintings and what cartoonists could do with cel animation: “ if you were Rembrandt today, you wouldn't be able to resist animation.” Williams had previously learned from and worked with most of these artists (all dead) on projects like his BAFTA-winning 1971 TV version of “A Christmas Carol” (executive produced by “Loonie Tunes” God Chuck Jones, who recommended Williams for the job) the 1977 feature “Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical” and the Oscar-winning 1988 live-action/animated hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Williams’ career and work is not, in that sense, the result of solitary ingenuity, but of collective imagination.īorn in 1933, Williams first saw and was taken in by “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” when he was five years old that film’s Evil Queen antagonist was animated by Babbitt, his future colleague. But Williams, who died of cancer this weekend, was also significantly aided in his quest to make animation “grow up” by old-school cartoonists like Art Babbitt (an influential former Disney animator who got on the studio's shit list after he joined the animators' strike of 1941) Emery Hawkins (who re-designed Woody Woodpecker in the mid-1940s) and Grim Natwick (Fleischer Studios animator most famous for his work on Betty Boop). Williams has often been hailed for the “persistence of vision” (also the title of a 2012 documentary about Williams) that he needed to continue working, for decades, on “The Thief and the Cobbler,” a gorgeous animated fairy tale (based on Persian and Ottoman paintings and fables by Sufi folk hero Nasreddin Hodja) that was sadly never completed.
0 kommentar(er)
