page_title: Richard Williams (animator)
section_title: 1960s - Richard Williams Animation, film titles, and commercials
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Williams (animator) / Career / 1960s - Richard Williams Animation, film titles, and commercials
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Soho Square, London, in 1992. The Post Office Tower can be seen in the backrground.
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: The critical and financial success of Williams's next short, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962), which was narrated by Kenneth Williams, enabled him to establish his own company, Richard Williams Animation Ltd. He made the short film A Lecture on Man that same year. Richard Williams Animation Ltd. eventually completed over 2,500 TV commercials, and won numerous awards, at its home at 13 Soho Square in Soho, London. 
  In 1965 he made the short film The Dermis Probe, and also animated the title sequences to What's New Pussycat? (1965).  In 1966 he animated the titles for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Also in 1966 a television documentary, The Creative Person, was made about his life and work. In 1967 he completed the short film The Sailor and the Devil, mainly animated by the illustrator Errol Le Cain, and also animated the title sequence for Casino Royale.
  In 1968 his studio won accolades for the animated segments in Tony Richardson's epic feature film about the Crimean War, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), which Williams described as "the best job I ever had". Film critic Vincent Canby described Williams' work as “marvelous animated line drawings, done in the style of patriotic mid-19th-century cartoons".
  In the mid-1960s Williams began work on the personal project that he intended to be “the best animated feature ever”, based on the tales of Mulla Nasrudin, and initially titled Nasrudin. The project evolved over time and in 1973 he would settle on a new story and title, The Thief and the Cobbler.
  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Williams hired and brought to London a number of the great Hollywood animators from the 1930s, elderly men who were by then nearing retirement. These included Art Babbitt (Goofy), Grim Natwick (Betty Boop), and Ken Harris (Wile E. Coyote). Babbitt, in particular, gave masterclasses at 13 Soho Square, training a new generation of animators. 
  Following the 1967 release of Disney's The Jungle Book, Williams first met master animator Milt Kahl, with whom he would become friends. Kahl had animated Shere Khan, the tiger, and Williams knelt down to polish his shoes. But Kahl said to him: “You can stop cleaning my shoes because you draw better than I do; but then you can clean them some more because you can’t animate.”
  TV commercials provided Richard Williams Animation with its main source of income. Although Williams despised the form, director Clive Donner persuaded him to raise his game. Following a successful commercial for Guinness beer, set in London's Royal Albert Hall, which won multiple awards, William's studio became well known for commercials, bringing characters such as Cresta Bear to life.
caption: Soho Square in 1992. Richard Williams Animation is the green building to the right of the mock Tudor structure.
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