Fuck Yeah, The Thief and the Cobbler!

tygerbug:

  Alex Williams, who animated on The Thief and the Cobbler and is Richard Williams’ son, asked me to write up an interview for his blog.

  As usual I wrote something extremely long. I can’t seem to help myself there. I am a verbose man.

  So here it is.

Video Preview of the Mark 4 Recobbled Cut!

AW: What is the Recobbled Cut?

GG: The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut (Mark 4) is an unofficial restoration of an incredible and otherwise-unfinished animated feature by Richard Williams, who won three Oscars for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Christmas Carol. We’ve tracked down and restored rare footage from all over the world and created new material to present the film in as complete and watchable a form as possible. Unfortunately with the film mostly complete, Dick was fired and replaced by someone who “completed” the film quickly, cheaply and poorly. So we’re working with occasionally-inferior footage, but doing our damndest to make sure that Dick’s original vision shines through.

AW: What made you want to take this project on?

GG: People who really know animation might know the sad story of The Thief and the Cobbler. It’s a complicated story and I apologize in advance if I misspeak, but here’s the story as I understand it. Your father spent over 23 years working on this one film, a visually lush Arabian Nights fantasy which he intended to be his masterpiece, and which contains some of the most complex animation ever attempted onscreen. He was never able to get full funding for the film until after Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1989, so for two decades he’d just pick at it, inbetween working on some amazing animated commercials, and the Oscar-winning A Christmas Carol, and Raggedy Ann & Andy, and so on.

And his art style kept changing, becoming more complex. When he started in the 1960s, classic Disney-style animation had largely gone out of style, replaced by cheap and simple “modern design,” suitable for television. Richard Williams was a brilliant artist but he wanted to be a great animator, and this film was his way to learn. He hired some of the greatest old guard animators - Art Babbitt, Ken Harris, Grim Natwick, Emery Hawkins - very late in their lives, to pass on their knowledge to a new generation before it was lost forever. Richard’s studio helped train the great animators of the 80s and 90s, like Eric Goldberg and Andreas Deja, and helped make the Disney renaissance (Aladdin, The Lion King) possible. It’s a hugely influential film, even though it’s wound up as a footnote in history.

And it’s a work of genius, plain and simple. Richard Williams is a genius, with all that that implies. He was difficult to work for, and demanded perfection from his crew, but he was also an inspiration, and has become one of the great teachers, now. All these years later he’s become the great, legendary animator he could only pretend to be in the 70s, and has literally written the book on how to animate - The Animator’s Survival Kit, easily the best book ever written on the subject. But people haven’t seen the project he treasured more than any other. Because there wasn’t any good quality, complete version of it you could really watch.

AW: What is it about the original film that so inspires you?


GG: It haunted me, quite frankly. I’d never seen anything like it, and I still haven’t.

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