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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

1995. I had just moved to Los Angeles to study animation. I was inspired by the Disney renaissance -- Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and especially Aladdin. One day, I saw a trailer for an Aladdin rip-off called Arabian Knight. There were a lot of Disney knock offs at the time, and there were all forgettable. But this one wasn’t. It was really bizarre.

There was a wise cracking thief with the voice of Jonathan Winters, trying to do a Robin Williams sort of riff. Matthew Broderick voiced the main character, a cobbler who was in love with princess that looked like Jasmine. Her father looked like Jasmine’s father, and he was being manipulated by an evil grand Vizier – who looked like Jafar -- but this guy was voiced by Vincent Price – who was dead at the time. I was like, when did he record these tracks? The weird thing was that some of the animation in the trailer looked terrible, but some of it was really fluid and super detailed, unlike anything I’d ever seen.

One of my first animation instructors was a guy named Alex Williams. And he told us that father, Richard Williams, had made that movie. Except it wasn’t his movie. It was originally called The Thief and the Cobbler, and he had been working on it for 30 years. He had set out to make the greatest animated film of all time. But he couldn't finish it, so the studio took the film away from him, and finished it themselves. And if the film looked like Aladdin, that was no coincidence. He wasn’t ripping off Disney – Disney copied him.

Alex something called “ the work print,” which was the last verison of The Thief and The Cobbler before the studio took it away. Some of it was finished, some of it was black and white, and some scenes were still just storyboards with voice tracks.

The two main characters, the thief and the cobbler were originally supposed to be silent like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and their animation was so incredibly fluid. Think of it this way. Film is 24 frames per second. In animation, you don’t have to do 24 drawings per second. Disney usually gets away with 12 drawings per second. Japanese animation will use maybe 6 drawings per second. His father Richard Williams animated on 1s as they say in the business. He made sure there were 24 drawings for 2 every single second of film. That’s one reason why he spent 30 years on this film.

And the backgrounds were like Persian miniatures turned into MC Escher paintings that moved. All of this was done before computers. Richard Williams made one of his employees spent an entire year working on a single camera move through an ancient cityscape.

So what happened? How did a man who was heralded in the 1970s as the next Walt Disney, end up as the Captain Ahab or Don Quixote of the animation world?

The first guy I need to talk with was Garrett Gilchrist. He’s a filmmaker in upstate New York. Like me, he had seen Arabian Knight, and then the work print of The Thief and the Cobbler.

GG: I felt like I had a religious experience where, I’ve seen the greatest animated film and I can’t even show it to anybody, I can’t explain it because they’d have to watch a lot of garbage and dream you know, and fill it in in their heads.

So he took it upon himself to finish The Thief and The Cobbler himself. It took him years. Its called The Recobbled Cut, and its on YouTube. And he wanted Richard Williams to know about it. So he flew to Los Angeles when Williams as there to screen the work print for animation fans. But Williams is very private. He won’t do any interviews about The Thief and The Cobbler. He even forbade his family members from talking about it publicly.

GG: I spent a little time with his ex-wife who wrote the film Margaret French and when we’re driving up to the screening she says to me, don’t go up to Dick Williams, I didn’t find that out until afterwards they were pissed that I came up to Dick Williams at the end and I said I’ve researched your film for many years and did a thing called The Recobbled Cut. And he said, oh, you’ve got to do your own stuff! (laughs) It was like the oh God (laughs) why are you doing this? Why can’t you leave me alone?

Kevin Schrek had a similar experience. When he was in college, he saw the work print and Garrett’s Recobbled Cut.

KS: I became obsessed with this story of obsession.

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But where Garrett tried to fix a historic mistake, Kevin made a documentary about Richard Williams called Persistence of Vision, which tries to answer the question so many fans have been asking. Why didn’t he finish the damn film?

CLIP FROM THE FILM

To answer that question, we need to start to start from the beginning.

Richard Williams grew up in Toronto. He was fascinated by Disney film as a kid. As a young man, he dabbled with being a fine artist, and eventually he went back to his first love. But he wanted to marry the two, create animation that was also fine art. To he opened a studio in London.

KS: Going to England made sense there was small but developing network of animation studios flourishing in London in Soho whereas in Los Angeles already complexly built and it would’ve been harder to fit in there.

Greg Duffell worked for Richard Williams in the early ‘70s. He says Williams used to talk about this big aha moment which inspired him to create this studio.

GD: He went to see Jungle Book in 1967 and was just completely floored.

CLIP: JUNGLE BOOK

GD: This is a man young man sure he’d been involved in animation as a professional for at least well over a decade by this point and he’s basically watching the Jungle Book and saying I don’t know how to do my job I must learn how to do my job.

At that time, traditional animation was dying, literally. Walt Disney passed away during the making of The Jungle Book. The film was finished by his top animators, who were known as The Nine Old Men. The Jungle Book was a throwback. The hot style in the ‘60s was Hanna Barbara – cheap, fast, using every short cut they could imagine. Garrett says Dick Williams decided at that moment that he was going to be the keeper of the flame for the old way of doing animation.

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GG: Now there’s a lot of PT Barnum to Dick Williams. He was bullshitting a lot -- he would sell himself as the next Walt Disney there’s hundreds of news article that say Dick Williams the next Walt Disney I don’t know if he ever bought that personally, he always felt this yearning desire to be a better animator. I think he always felt like a fraud on some level.

One of his first employees was a legendary Disney animator named Art Babbitt. The guy had worked on Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo. Babbitt could’ve been one of the great Disney animators, but he got fired in the ‘40s because he organized a strike to create an animation labor union. So when word spread that he was working again – in England for Richard Williams – it was big news.

Williams also hired one of the great Warner Brothers animators, Ken Harris, who worked with Chuck Jones to create the Road Runner and Will E. Coyote. This was also kind of a Noah’s Ark move because in the late ‘60s, Warner Brothers was abandoning classical animation and letting all these veterans go. He also hired Grim Natwick, the animator who invented Betty Boop well before Richard Williams was even born.

On one hand, Williams worshiped these guys. But he was also their boss. And that played out in weird ways.

Most of the time, they were cranking out commercial that aired the UK. They worked on the Thief and The Cobbler during their down time.

There’s this one sequence that Richard Williams himself was working on where the Grand Vizier tries to do a card trick, almost drops all the cards, but manages to juggle them back in place. It’s a really cool piece of animation.

KS: The card sequence was sort of a graduation piece for Richard Williams.

Again, here’s documentary filmmaker Kevin Schreck.

KS: He got exited showing it to Ken Harris and Ken in his quiet way was like oh gee that’s really nice, and Williams taken aback because he really keen on impressing Ken look how good an animator I a, and Ken was lke you could be great animator some day, he wasn’t there yet and by this time RW was just shy of 40 and so he spent several months on this scene, and refining it by time he 5 had the pencil test version shot on the Moviola these months later Ken said all right you are an animator.

But Williams couldn’t let it go. He had each card hand painted, but then he decided to redo the animation, so that artist had to repaint every card again.

KS: He was interesting in making big film statement, this is animation is, or animation could be much more than what we are lead to believe animation simply is in the commercial world.

But the guys working on those commercials got frustrated with Williams. – even his hero Art Babbitt. Greg Duffell remembers this one really tense staff meeting about a soft drink commercial.

GD: In a screening we had, and we had screenings every morning, when this material came on, Art Babbitt said, “You know Dick I’ve been going around studio, and I’ve been noticing people are actually drawing each one of these bottles! And Dick said, yeah, yeah that’s what we do, we do that. And Art went, but Dick in Hollywood we make are what called C-prints, we make photographs of the product and then we apply those cut outs to the cells and this makes sure the product looks good and it does not have to be redrawn and not using intensive labor to do something repetitive like this. Dick is like, yeah, yeah, Art but you know that’s why I’m in England. Cheap Labor! You can imagine this didn’t go well terribly well with people. They even said so after they lef the screening theater.

Garrett Gilchrist hates this narrative of Dick Williams the mad perfectionist.

GG: Animators would say, “Oh he was making so complicated and difficult, it was ridiculous!” If you dig out scenes it’s actually not very complicated back then the camera effects were very complicated. These animators working with him didn’t have the skills themselves and thought that what was happening was much more complex than it actually was because Dick -- he was a major inspiration for Disney renaissance, because when you look at those Disney renaissance films, it really had to look perfect on screen, and it was more complex than the stuff people said Dick was crazy for doing in the ‘70s.

Dick Williams’s studio was thriving in the ‘70s. They cranking out commercials. They did the Pink Panther opening sequence, and they even 6 took on The Raggedy Ann and Andy movie, which Dick Williams didn’t want to do but he need the money. He kept trying to get financial backers to let him dedicate all his resources to The Thief and The Cobbler, but the money falling through. Then in the mid 1980s, Dick Williams took a meeting that would change his life.

Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were teaming up to make Roger Rabbit. But Disney wasn’t really equipped to do the animation properly. They were still years away from making The Little Mermaid. Then Spielberg and Zemeckis saw footage of The Thief and The Cobbler, which Williams was showing everybody to raise money and they realized that he was the only person in the world still doing animation as it had been done in the 1940s. They could not make Roger Rabbit without him.

KS: He won Best Visual Effects category at the Oscars, he was also given a special achievement award in animation and only one other person had won at the time, and that was Walt Disney himself. I guess everyone at Academy was just so blown away by what he’d done, one award wasn’t enough for this guy, so he was speaking at the podium with two awards in his hands that evening.

CLIP: Thanks! The best is yet to come!

This was his big chance. Warner Brothers was starting a feature animation division to compete with Disney. They offer him $50 million to finish and market the film He built a new crew with some of his favorite animators - including Neil Boyle.

NB: One of the lovely things about working with Dick he kept a childlike enthusiasm all the time no matter what politics or how hard we were working. If you’d done something he liked, he would literally jump up and down be excited, come over, come over everyone and look at this! He couldn’t bottle it, he had to share it with everyone.

As you can hear, we had a really bad Skype connection, but his insights on those final years were really interesting. Neil says they knew there was now a hard headline the finish The Thief and The Cobbler, but he wasn’t worried.

NB: I worked with Dick for so many years on some many things, and he never missed a deadline, we had to work like crazy and we had to work all night and he 7 had to push people to produce more than they thought they could, so it was tough working with him but you know I never minded that because he always worked harder than everyone.

But they were falling behind schedule. Greg Duffell hadn’t worked for Richard Williams in years, but during that time, he met with an executive at Warner Brothers.

GD: And we were chatting and it came up that she got back from England, Warner Brothers sent her over to England to see what was going on. She said, well I don’t why they went me over there, I don’t know why they sent me over there, I don’t anything about animation, extraordinary thing someone who is running division about animation, but I asked her what she saw and she started describing a sequence and I started telling her about sequence, she says how would you know that? I saw that 25 years ago, that very sequence that you’re talking about, that very scene. But it had been presented to them as if it was new footage.

The animator who did that sequence had been dead for 10 years.

KS: I think the longer you have something incubating and growing and telling the world it’s going to be a masterpiece, I have this masterpiece in the making – the more pressure to deliver that said masterpiece.

Kevin Schrek thinks the studio just didn’t understand the kind of filmmaker that they were backing.

KS: Warner Brothers wanted songs because every animated film is a musical or at least is a quasi-musical with three or four songs schmaltzy pop ballad in the end credits that could be a hit single, Williams not interest in songs, he did entertain the idea for a little bit they brought in big people in rock and pop, people like Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, Roger Waters, they all showed up at the studio, I think Waters made a demo for something. Oh my God, I would love to hear that. Ha! RW: Yeah, it’s super rare, people from Beatles and Pink Floyd and onward. Holy crap. RW: And they were impressed what was happening but it wasn’t a film that would work with Brian Eno, Roger Waters or Paul McCartney song. He was interested in having things with big grandiose classical music, he wanted Ralph Von Williams, lush cinematic grandiose classical works. His goal wasn’t to make a big 8 blockbuster that would seat family of four with their giant bags of popcorn and their giant concession stand sodas. And sell toys. KS: And sell toys exactly and bed sheets and lunch boxes and action figures or whatever. He was making really an art project I think.

Warner Brothers got worried. They asked a guy to keep tabs on him, a washed up produced named Fred Calvart.

KS: And I think I think there’s an attitude among people who get absorbed in big narrative like this and they want to have a villain that is really defined, and I think he was just a hired hand. The thing is if it wasn’t literally Fred Calvart, it would’ve been another Fred Calvart.

Garrett Gilchrist says no – this guy was not just any hired hand.

GG: Fred was a cheapskate, he was morning worst animation ever.

That sound harsh, but it really was like the worst animation ever. Fred Calvart did a Munsters cartoon show, the Muhammad Ali cartoon show -- the very stuff that Dick Williams was trying to make a statement against.

GG: Well the problem was diametric opposites, Fred only cared about money, he didn’t care about quality and Dick Williams only cared about quality.

And then Richard Williams missed his deadline. There were no extensions. The Completion Bond Company gave them 24 hours to clear out. All the artwork was shipped to Los Angeles.

Neil Boyle was shell-shocked. He didn’t think they were that far behind.

NB: I thought a lot about how the film came to an end, and I thought if I had been working on my dream production for 35 years and I had that taken away from me I would be a wreck, I would be kicking the walls and sobbing, Richard Williams was incredibly calm, he was sad but he was philosophical, and really thankful to the crew, he said I’m sorry about this and you’ve all worked so hard but it just isn’t going to happen, and he was philosophical about it which surprised me, because I would’ve been kicking the walls down.

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Although Richard Williams didn’t realize what was going to happen to his film. Fred Calvert spent 18 months recreating the movie, as he would have done it. He even asked the animators to pull out frames so Williams’s animation could match the stuff he was doing on the cheap.

And then that same year, Disney released a film called Aladdin – which bore a very striking resemblance.

GG: Dick’s work got him the job on Roger Rabbit so of course Disney knew Thief you know you had same people certainly Eric Goldberg who did such amazing work on genie had gotten his start on Dick Williams. Andreas Dejas who did Jafar, you know a lot of people were taught by Dick.

The final irony was that Miramax – owned by Disney – bought the rights to distribute the film in North America.

GG: And they turned it into a film that openly at the beginning says, this is a rip- off of Aladdin. There’s a line that says before the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, the tack, the cobbler has this line, who needs a genie when you’ve got a tack.

Oh, and there were songs – NOT by Roger Waters or Brian Eno.

CLIP SINGING

GG: It was the most humiliating ending possible for this film.

NB: And that says they wanted a different film, they didn’t want the film they were getting which was odd because they read the script and they signed off on the script and there were no surprises the script I read when I started the movie was the script we were making. That is an excellent point, I didn’t think about if the issue was finishing the film, it would have been much less work to finish the film, they actually put more work into butchering it and reconstructing it! NB: Well that’s where I smell a rat, because why would you do that?!

So I interviewed four guys. Two of them blame Richard Williams for his own downfall – the mad perfectionist. The other two blame the studio – casting them as the thief and Richard Williams as the cobbler.

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I’m of two minds about it. I knew some of those execs. They would come to our animation classes to recruit us and they struck me as deeply cynical. I remember one guy saying about the hero of their movie Quest for Camelot that was a “Vanilla Ice Cream hero” because you always need that handsome boring guy! I had friends who worked on The Iron Giant, and they were baffled as to why the studio wasn’t excited about this movie. They buried it like it was a dud, and promoted the hell out of Quest for Camelot, which was a disaster. When Brad Bird pitched them The Incredibles, they passed and he went to Pixar!

On the other hand, there is another difference between them and Richard Williams. The artists AND the executives at all the studios talk about nothing but story. Story, story -- it all comes down to having a great. Some of them wouldn’t know a great story if it smacked them on the head, but they have the right idea.

Richard Williams didn’t talk about story. I always wondered why this story spoke to him. Did he identify with The Thief or The Cobbler. But it wasn’t like that for him. He saw his film like a painting of a bowl of fruit or a nude model -- the subject was beside the point. The story was in the way he told it. The medium was the message. Animation is an art form about movement. Take it seriously.

NB: Most of the animation of that period you might have some mostly nicely animated characters but they’d be against dead world, there was nicely painted background but nothing moved, leaves weren’t blowing in trees, there was no birds in skies littler wasn’t blowing in the wind, none of that stuff going on, just a character standing in front of a static painted background. I think the reason that he pushed so hard on the quality was his vision very much was of trying to create a complete world.

But if your goal isn’t to hit a story point or convey emotion, your goal is to make a statement and blow people away with the magic of your illusions – when do you know you’ve got it? When do you know it’s time to stop?

After years in exile, Richard Williams finally resurfaced teaching a master class on animation. He wrote a book. But he’s not passing himself off as a master animator. In his 80s, he’s still working hard on perfecting his craft.

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NB: And I think that is inspiring. When you see someone as damn good as he is, and he’s still questioning himself and say I can be better – I can draw better, I can animate better – I still find that inspirational.

And he’s trotting around the globe showing the work print of The Thief and The Cobbler in front of audiences, essentially as a work of art, which is what it always was. So in that sense, he did get what he wanted. Kevin Schreck:

KS: You know I think a lot of people thrown in towel, he couldn’t work on thief anymore but hadn’t fall out of love with the art form with animation. Yeah, in a weird way it inspires you to always be better. KS: Yeah, yeah. Even though that lead to his downfall, I don’t hear that story, and that’s why when things feel good enough let them be, I don’t feel that way at all, I feel like God! Wow! What you can achieve with such perfectionism. KS: It makes you want to climb a mountain or compose a symphony or declare something important to someone you care about or make a film, it makes you want to live I think ultimately.

Well, that’s it for this week’s show. Special thanks to Kevin Schreck, Garrett Gilchrist, Greg Duffell and Neil Boyle. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky. The show’s website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org.