page_title: Richard Williams (animator)
section_title: 1980s - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Williams (animator) / Career / 1980s - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Williams at the 100 Club with DixSix in 1985
context_page_description: Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian–British animator, voice actor, director, and writer, best known for serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for which he won two Academy Awards, and for his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animation in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
context_section_description: In 1982, Williams directed Ziggy's Gift, a television special in which Ziggy takes a job as a sidewalk Santa. The film won an Emmy Award, and in the same year he appeared in a Thames Television documentary titled Richard Williams and The Thief Who Never Gave Up.
  In 1987 Williams embarked on his biggest project to date, becoming animation director on the Disney/Spielberg film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Williams was initially reluctant to work on the film, did not want to move to Los Angeles, so production was moved to London. When pitched the idea, Williams said to executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis "I just hate animation and live-action together; it just doesn't work, it's ugly".
  Disney and Spielberg promised Williams that in return for doing the film, they would help finance and distribute the still-unfinished The Thief and the Cobbler. Williams designed the characters for the film, including Jessica Rabbit. He said of Jessica that she was "the ultimate male fantasy, drawn by a cartoonist. I tried to make her like Rita Hayworth; we took her hair from Veronica Lake, and Zemeckis kept saying, 'What about the look Lauren Bacall had?'" Blessed with tremendous energy, Williams barely slept and worked through multiple nights to get the animation finished on time. 
  In 1988 another documentary was released about Williams, titled I Drew Roger Rabbit.  In 1989, following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams won two more Academy Awards for his work, a joint award for Best Special Effects, shared with Ken Ralston, Ed Jones and George Gibbs and a Special Achievement Award. Williams said "I'm (in) the same business as Goya and Rembrandt. I may be rotten at it with nothing of the same quality or talent, but that's my business".
  Apart from animation, Williams's great passion was Dixieland jazz. He led an ensemble in London named Dix Six that played regular gigs at venues such as the PizzaExpress Jazz Club, The 100 Club, and the Britannia Hotel in Grosvenor Square.
caption: Richard Williams at the 100 Club with his band DixSix in 1985
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