page_title: Richard Williams (animator)
section_title: 2000s & 2010s - The Animator's Survival Kit and Prologue
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Williams (animator) / Career / 2000s & 2010s - The Animator's Survival Kit and Prologue
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Williams at Aardman Animation in 2015, working on his animated short "Prologue"
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 notes for Williams' masterclass formed the basis for a definitive book on the art of animation, and in 2002 Faber & Faber published Williams' acclaimed animation how-to book, The Animator's Survival Kit, with an "expanded edition" following in 2009.  The book soon became a key reference for animators, both in print and later on as a DVD box set and an iPad application. The historian Kevin Brownlow described the ASK as “utterly riveting, even to a layman.”
  From 2008 Williams began to work as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked at one of his original 1938 Disney animation desks. Aardman co-founder Peter Lord described Williams as exemplifying "pure creativity; he seemed to us to work without compromise and for the sheer love of his chosen art-form. No deadlines, except the ones he set himself, nobody to please or answer to, except himself. [He was] our special guest, our resident celebrity". 
  Even in his 80s, Williams continued to work every day, and do a full day's work. He liked to enter his office at Aardman by the fire escape "just to avoid people". Williams celebrated the creative freedom he enjoyed: "Nobody's going to call me — well, maybe [my] wife, ...nobody's going to walk in. I don't have to say hello to anybody. You know, I'm free." 
  But his advice to aspiring film-makers could be bleak: "Persist," he told an audience at a screening of his work; "Keep going. Don't get stopped. Because they're going to stop you if they can."
  In 2010 Williams completed his 9-minute short film titled Circus Drawings, first begun in Ibiza in the early 1950s. The silent film, with live accompaniment, premiered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010.
  On December 10, 2013, the director's cut of The Thief and the Cobbler, a workprint of the film, subtitled "A Moment in Time", was screened in Los Angeles. Williams participated in the event.  However, a final, finished version of the film as Williams had long envisioned would never be completed.
  In 2015 his short film Prologue received both an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA nomination in the category of best animated short. Prologue was the first 6 minutes of his hand-drawn feature film Lysistrata, based on the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, which Williams joked should be sub-titled "Will I Live to Finish It?". Williams described Prologue as "the only thing so far in my career that I’ve ever really been pleased with." In 2013 Williams told The Guardian, "All I need is some time and five or six assistants who can draw like hell." The film was intended to be "grim but funny and salacious and sexy". Like The Thief and the Cobbler, Prologue would never be completed. But, as Williams put it: "it's the doing of it that matters. Do it for the love of it. That's all there is".
caption: Richard Williams at Aardman Animation in 2015, at work on Prologue.
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