Welcome to Tackipedia, the Richard Williams Wiki
Richard Williams is the three-time Academy Award winning master animator who gave us The Thief and the Cobbler, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, A Christmas Carol, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, and many memorable TV commercials. He is the author of The Animator's Survival Kit and the 16-DVD set The Animator's Survival Kit: Animated, considered the definitive training course for animators.
Richard Williams spent 25 years creating The Thief and the Cobbler, an Arabian Nights feature fantasy which sadly was never finished. Williams had previously funded the film with millions of pounds of his own money, intending it to be his masterpiece. Warner Bros. funded the film after the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but pulled out months before its completion, feeling that the film was uncommercial, and would face stiff competition from Aladdin, a film The Thief and the Cobbler inspired.
The film was "finished" on the cheap by Fred Calvert and the Completion Bond company, in versions called The Princess and the Cobbler and Arabian Knight, which are both hilariously terrible and have nothing to do with what Richard Williams intended the film to be.
In 2006, filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist edited together The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut, an unofficial restoration of Richard Williams' unfinished film. This edit uses all available footage from Williams' workprint and the released Calvert versions of the film, as well as many rarer sources including a 35mm film reel salvaged from Jean MacCurdy's trash by an animator. The edit uses these disparate sources [even the poor Calvert animation] to show what the nearly-completed film would have been like.
In 2019, He died in England.
Gilchrist also runs TheThiefArchive on Youtube, a collection of rare video from Richard Williams Animation Studio, which for years exemplified the best of British animation at a very exciting time. There are discussion forums at http://orangecow.org/board and at Facebook , where more and more information and video has been brought to light.
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