1 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. 3 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. 4 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.