RIP animator Richard Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit)

Just heard the sad news that Richard Williams had died at age 87:

Richard Williams, 'Roger Rabbit' and 'Pink Panther' animator, dead at 86 - CNN

A phenomenal artist, his work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the absolute pinnacle of traditional cel animation. Tragic that his labor of love The Thief and the Cobbler was never completed after having been taken from him by the money people.

 

Noooooooooo......

 

Sorry.

 

A great loss. I have his indispensable book The Animator's Survival Book - every animator should have a copy!

 

A great, visionary original. RIP.

 

rest in peace...

 

RIP Richard Williams, remember his work on Pink Panther and of course Who Framed Roger Rabbit!

 

It's not his work that was important...it was the fact that he did it!

It was hard in that era to find a niche to work in that didn't involve the Mouse House, whether it was reacting to it, working around it, working under it,
or doing what we all essentially wanted animators to be able to do...surpass it, having the freedom to do our own thing.

Cherish your accomplishments, but never lose sight of your blessing, or being able to accomplish at all.

Godspeed!

 

It's seems all pioneers of 20th century animation are going..
What do we have left? not much ..I go to cartoon brew website and toonzone
Nothing to write home about.
R.I.P

 

RIP

he was one of the greats, for sure

thanks for all the laughs

 

Don't forget this fabulous little film of his at Christmas!

 

In retrospect, I...don't know how to respond to that.

Yes, things and people making noise and news from 20 years ago, are certainly living under a shorter shelf life. We are, after all, 1/5th of the way through the 21st Century.

And, I was just at Cartoon Brew, and saw a number of press-release-oriented news scrolling in the area that is designed for things like press releases.
And press releases are more often than not generated by people looking for...press. To satisfy people looking to read...press.
And as of today, the most "20th-Century-pioneers"-oriented story I saw was...somebody put the Quay Brothers place up for sale.

The animation business is bigger than ever, with the growth of markets to display all sorts of programming needing to be fulfilled. And the people who are going to get the next positions, are the ones we never heard of...because they are working on the skills and innovations that will position them to be candidates for those jobs. That means, the animation craft is bigger than ever. But, thanks to the innovations that make personal creativity so vibrant, so available and so...possible, we have more people adopting narrative, creative and production techniques into their own daily lives today, than in any time in history.

Think about that for a bit. This is tantamount to, say the computing power we used to get a team of men to the Moon and back, is less than the computing power we have in a little dongle that straps to our arm and plays music for us at the gym. A common joke involves a boomer musing about how he can ask his 7-year-old niece to straighten-out his WiFi for him. The man for whom we revere for bestowing the world's most prestigious Peace Prize rewards every year, was the man who invented dynamite; and then he gave us the Peace Prize.

Whether you believe what a so-named "news channel" with an anti-news agenda tells you every night, or you believe Donald Fagan when he sings about "what a beautiful world this will be", the facts still remain in your lap. Right there, next to your zipper (what an invention!): the facts that, history is changing slower than we demand, and faster than we notice. And every day brings us the tools to do something with the future, that will make the past, necessarily obsolete. And what this has to do with the loss of a British animator at a time in history when there was barely any animation of value in Britain, or the loss of a whole generation of "pioneers" in any discipline we respect...is that, you don't have to fret about losing icons. We lose them all by the process of history anyway.

What remains, is the promise that, we can always take what we have been given...and do something with that.

 

Great minds think alike! Precisely the film I wanted to cite.
It should be a Christmas staple, but it disappeared after '73
or so. Managed a VHS copy some years back.