Imaginary Worlds - The Greatest Cartoon Almost Made

Episode Date: June 3, 2015

At the height of his career, Richard Williams was hailed as the next Walt Disney -- and he won two visual effects Oscars for Roger Rabbit. But Williams wanted to prove that animation was high art, not just something to sell toys. So he spent three decades working on a feature film called The Thief and The Cobbler, which was going to be extraordinary. But Williams made a deal with a movie studio that he couldn't keep. Garrett Gilchrist, Kevin Schreck, Neil Boyle and Greg Duffell discuss whether Hollywood or Williams's perfectionism did him in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Shop Old Spice Total Body deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So I just moved to Los Angeles to study animation. This is the mid-1990s. You know, and I was really inspired by the whole Disney renaissance. Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Aladdin.

I loved Aladdin. And one day I saw a trailer for a movie that was like an Aladdin ripoff called Arabian Night. Matthew Broderick was the main character, sort of a cobbler, in love with a princess that looked like Jasmine. Her father looked like Jasmine's father, and he was being manipulated by a grand vizier who looked like Jafar. But this guy was voiced by Vincent Price, who was dead at the time. And I'm like, when did Vincent Price record these tracks? And the really weird thing is that some of the animation was terrible, but some of it was amazing. Some of it was like really, really fluid and detailed and unlike anything I'd ever seen.

Arabian Night. Cut to a year later. I'm at CalArts studying animation. And one of my instructors is a guy named Alex Williams. And he said, anyone ever see that trailer for Arabian Night? My father, Richard Williams, made that movie. But he didn't really make that movie. He made a movie called A Thief and the Cobbler.

He spent 30 years working on it. And he set out to make the greatest animated film of all time. But he made a deal with Warner Brothers to finish the movie, and he couldn't meet the deadline. So the studio took the film away from him and finished it themselves. And if it looked like Aladdin, that was no coincidence. He wasn't ripping off Disney. Disney was inspired by him. And then Alex showed us something called the work print, which was the last version of The Thief and the Cobbler before the studio took it away. Some of it was finished animation, totally colored in.

Some of it was still black and white, and some of the scenes were just storyboards with voice tracks. This low-born cobbler of no worth attacked me in the square today. Shall we take his head away? The first thing I thought was pretty interesting was that the main characters, The Thief and the Cobbler, were silent, like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. And it just played so beautifully on film.

Also, the animation was so fluid. I mean, 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 about 12 drawings per second, or as they say in the business, they're animating on twos. Japanese animation means six drawings per second. But his father, Richard Williams, animated on ones.

He made sure there were 24 drawings for every second of film. And the backgrounds were like a combination of Persian miniatures and M.C. Escher paintings that moved. And this was all done before computers. In fact, one of the crew members spent an entire year working on a single camera move through an ancient cityscape. So what happened? How did a man who in the 70s was often called the next Walt Disney end up as the Captain Ahab or Don Quixote of the animation world? So I contacted Alex Williams, and he said not only will his father not do any interviews, but he's asked his family not to do interviews either. But he recommended I talk with a guy named Garrett Gilchrist.

He's a filmmaker in New York. And like me, Garrett had seen Arabian Night and thought, what the hell is this? And then he saw the work print of The Thief of the Cobbler. I felt like I'd had a religious experience, right? Where I'd seen the greatest animated film I've ever seen.

And I can't even show it to anybody. I can't explain it because they would 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. Because I mean, besides Arabian Night, there was another version that was released in Europe called The Princess and the Cobbler. And so he kind of like took all three and he spent years creating what he called the recobbled cut. And it's on YouTube. And he really wanted Richard Williams to know that he had done this. So he flew to Los Angeles because he found out Richard

Williams was there to screen a work print of The Thief and the Cobbler for animation fans. I came up to Dick Williams at the end and I said, well, I've kind of 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. It was like the, oh God, why are you doing this? You know, like, why can't you leave me alone? Kevin Schreck had a similar experience. When he was in college, he discovered the work print, Arabian Night, and Garrett Gilchrist's recobbled cut.

I became sort of obsessed with this story of obsession. But where Garrett tried to fix a historic mistake, Kevin made a documentary about it called Persistence of Vision. The last three years, we've been trembling on the verge of getting full finance. We've had some finance. This is archival footage of Richard Williams from that documentary. It's a big risk. It means the thing has to grow 60 million bucks to make, it has to be a hit.

So to figure out why Richard Williams couldn't finish Thief and the Cobbler, we kind of have to start from the very beginning. He grew up in Toronto. He was fascinated by Disney films as a kid. And as a young man, he tried to be a fine artist, but eventually he decided that he kind of wanted to marry the two and create animation

that was also fine art. So he moved to London to open a studio. Going to England made sense because there was a small but developing network of animation studios flourishing in London, for example, mostly in the Soho neighborhood. Whereas in Los Angeles, that was already pretty complexly built. All the niches were kind of occupied, and it would be a little harder to fit in there. Greg Duffel worked for Richard Williams in the 70s. And he says, you know, Williams used to talk about this big aha moment that he had, which inspired him to kind of go down this path.

He went to see The Jungle Book when it came out in 1967. Yes, yes. And was just completely floored. I'd like a word with you, if you don't mind. Shere Khan. This is a man who had, you know, a young man, sure, but he had 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. Now 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 style of the 60s was cheap, fast, every shortcut you could imagine. And at that moment, Richard Williams decided that he was going to be the keeper of the flame for the old way of doing things.

Now, there's a lot of piti barnum to Dick Williams. I think he was bullsh's a lot of PT Barnum to Dick Williams. I think he was bullshitting a lot. He would sell himself as the next Walt Disney. There's literally hundreds of news articles which say, Dick Williams, the next Walt Disney. That was his whole thing for a long time. I don't know if he ever bought that, personally. I think he always felt this kind of yearning desire to be a better animator. I think he always felt like a fraud on some level. So he turned his studio into kind of a Noah's

arc of animation. One of his first employees was a Disney legend named Art Babbitt. He'd worked on, you know, Snow White and Fantasia. He could have been one of the great Disney animators of all time. But Walt fired him because he organized a strike to create a labor union. Williams also hired one of the great animators from Warner Brothers, Ken Harris, who had worked on the Roadrunner cartoons. And he hired Grim Natwick, the animator that invented Betty Boop before Richard Williams was even born. So on one hand, Dick Williams worships these guys, but he's also their boss. And that plays out in kind of weird ways. So most of the time, they were making commercials that aired in the UK.

They started working on The Thief and the Cobbler during their downtime. And there's one sequence that Dick Williams was working on by himself, where the Grand Vizier, you know, who's voiced by Vincent Price, is showing off a card trick. I have power over people, though they may appear complex. For me, they fall like playing cards. And I control the decks. And he almost drops the cards, but manages to juggle them back in place. And he's got several joints. He's got extra fingers.

And you'll see on the animation, there's 25 rings on each hand. And he's got two elbows, two shoulders on each bit. Maybe two asses, I'm not sure. And all the parts are cantilevered. So he's a manipulator, the master manipulator, so he himself is like a marionette, manipulating himself. The card sequence was sort of a graduation piece

for Richard Williams. Again, here's Kevin Schrag. He got excited about this scene that he had done and was showing it to Ken Harris. And Ken, in his sort of quiet way, was like, oh, gee, that's really nice. And Williams was taken aback because he was really keen on impressing ken and saying look how good of an animator i am

and ken was like basically saying yeah you could be a really great animator someday he wasn't there yet and by this time richard looms was about i think just shy of 40 or so and so he spent several months on this scene and really refining it. And by the time he had the pencil test version shot through the Moviola and showed it to Ken after all these months, Ken said, all right, you are an animator. But Williams couldn't let it go. Now each card was hand painted. And when he saw the final footage, he decided he didn't like the colors, so he had the artist repaint them all. He was really interested in making a big film that was a statement and said, this is what animation can be, much more than what we are led to believe animation simply is in the commercial world. But the guys working on those commercials got frustrated with Richard Williams, even his hero, Art Babbitt.

Greg Duffel, who worked there in the 70s, remembers this really tense staff meeting about a soft drink commercial. When this material came on, Art Babbitt said, You know, Dick, I've been going around the studio and I've been noticing that people are actually drawing each one of these bottles. And Dick said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what we do. That's what we do, Art. Yeah, we do that. We do that. And Art Babbitt went, but Dick, in Hollywood, what we do is we make what are called sea prints. we make what are called C prints. We make photographs of the product and then we apply those cutouts to the cells. And this makes sure that the product looks good and that it does not have to be redrawn. And we're not using intensive labor to do something repetitive like this. using intensive labor to do something repetitive like this. Dick is there and he's going,

yeah, yeah, well, art, but you know, that's why I'm in England. Cheap labor. Well, you can imagine this didn't go down terribly well with everybody even said so after they left the screening theater. For the record, Garrett Gilchrist hates this narrative. Dick Williams, the mad perfectionist. Animators will say, oh, he was just making everything so complicated and difficult and it's ridiculous. And when you actually dig out that footage, it's actually not very complicated what Dick was trying to do back then. It's not ridiculous. The camera effects were very complicated. But Dick, he was a major inspiration for the 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. But the studio was actually thriving in the 70s. They were cranking out commercials. They did some animation for the Pink Panther films. They took on a Raggedy Ann and Andy movie,

which Dick Williams really didn't want to do, but he needed the money. In the meantime, they kept trying to get financial backers to help them dedicate all the resources to the thief and the cobbler, but the money just kept falling through. And then, in the mid-1980s, Richard Williams got a job offer

that changed his life. Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were teaming up to make Roger Rabbit. But Disney wasn't really equipped to do that animation back then. They were still years away from The Little Mermaid. And then Spielberg and Zemeckis saw footage of the thief and the cobbler,

which Williams was showing everybody he could, Little Mermaid. And then Spielberg and Zemeckis saw footage of The Thief and the Cobbler, which Williams was showing everybody he could, and they realized he's doing animation exactly like it had been done in the Income Paint Club, why don't you read it to him now? Sure, buddy. He won Best Visual Effects category in the Oscars. He was also given a Special Achievement Award in Animation, which only one other person had won at the time, and that was Walt Disney himself.

Please welcome Richard Wheeler. I guess everyone at the Academy was just so blown away by what he did. It's like, one award isn't enough for this guy. So he was speaking at the podium with two awards in his hand that evening. Thanks. The best is yet to come. This was his big chance.

After Roger Rabbit, Disney Animation was ramping up, and Warner Brothers was starting a feature unit to compete with them. They offered Richard Williams $50 million to finish and market the film. So he built up a new crew, a lot of students that he trained from scratch, and he handpicked some of his favorite animators, including Neil Boyle. One of the lovely things about working with Dick was that he kept a childlike enthusiasm all the time, you know, in looking at no matter what kind of politics were going on or how hard we were working or whatever. If he'd done something he liked, he would literally jump up and down and be excited and say, come over, come over, everyone, look at this. You know, and he was so enthusiastic about it, he couldn't bottle it.

You know, he had to share it with everyone. So as you can hear, we had kind of a bad transatlantic Skype connection, but his insights in those final years were really interesting. Now, Neil says they knew that there was a hard deadline to finish The Thief and the Cobbler, but he wasn't worried. I mean, I worked with so many years on so many things and never missed a deadline. I mean, we had to work like crazy and we often worked all night and he definitely pushed people to produce more than they thought they could. So it was tough work working with him.

You know, I never minded that because he always worked harder than anyone. I never minded that because he always worked harder than anyone. But they were falling behind schedule. Greg Duffel, the guy that had worked with Richard Williams back in the 70s, was meeting an executive at Warner Brothers. And so we were just chatting and it came up that she'd just got back from England. Warner Brothers had sent her over to England to, you know, see what was going on on this production. And I mean, she said an extraordinary thing at one point. She said,

she said, I don't know why they sent me over there. I don't know anything about animation. That was just an extraordinary thing to say straight faced for someone who runs, you know, is running a division about animation. But, you know, I knew Richard Williams and I was interested to know what happened over there, you know, because just what she'd seen. And she started describing a sequence. And then I kind of interrupted her and I started telling her about the sequence. And she says, well, how would you know that? And I said, well, 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. And the animator who did that sequence had been dead for 10 years. I think the longer you have something incubating like that, and that you're insulating to yourself, and growing, and telling the world,

it's going to be a masterpiece, I have this masterpiece in the making, you're going to get a masterpiece, the more pressure it is going to be a masterpiece. I have this masterpiece in the making. You're going to get a masterpiece. The more pressure it is to deliver that said masterpiece. Kevin Schreck thinks the studio just didn't understand the kind of filmmaker they were backing. Warner Brothers wanted to have songs because the expectation was every single animated film is a musical,

or at least is a quasi-musical with at least three or four songs, one of which is a schmaltzy pop ballad you can make in the end credits or something and that can be the hit single or something like that um williams had really no interest in having songs he did entertain the idea for a little bit and they brought in a lot of big people in the world of rock people like paul mccartney and um roger waters and brian eno and a couple others they all showed up at the studio i think waters even made a a demo for something oh my god i'd love to hear that. I've never heard it. It's super rare apparently. But yeah, he had people from the Beatles and Pink Floyd and onward. And these showing up and they were impressed with what was happening

but it just wasn't working out. It's not really a film that would work with a Paul McCartney or Roger Waters or Brian Eno or whatever sort of song. He was interested in having things with a lot of big grandiose classical music, for example. He wanted to have Ray Fawn Williams. He wanted to have Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his lush, cinematic, grandiose classical works. His goal wasn't really to make a big blockbuster that would seat a family of four with their giant bags of popcorn and their giant concession stand sodas.

And sell toys. And sell toys, exactly, and bed sheets and lunchboxes and action figures or whatever. He was making really an art project, I think. Warner Brothers got worried. So they found another producer to keep tabs on Richard Williams, a guy named Fred Calvert. I think that there's sort of an attitude among people who get absorbed in a big sort of narrative like this, and they want to have a villain that's really defined.

And I really think he was just a hired hand. The thing is, if it wasn't literally Fred Calvert, it would have been another Fred Calvert. But Garrett Gilchrist says, no, this guy was not just any hired hand. Fred was a cheapskate. He was a Saturday morning cheapskate who had done basically the worst animation ever. Fred Calvert did a Munsters cartoon show and he did the Muhammad Ali Saturday morning cartoon show. Well, the problem is Fred Calvin and Richard Williams were diametric opposites. Fred only cared about the money, you know, bringing it out cheaply. He did not care about quality and Dick Williams only cared about quality. And then Richard Williams missed his deadline

and 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. I've thought a lot about this, about how the film came to an end, and I thought if that was me, if I'd been working on my dream production for 35 years and I had that taken

away from me, I think I would be a wreck. I would be kicking the walls down or sobbing or something. Richard Williams was incredibly harm in a way. I mean, he was sad, but he was philosophical and really thankful for the crew. I mean,

he talked to us and he said, you know, I'm sorry about this and you've all worked so hard, but it just isn't going to happen, which surprised me because, as I say, I think I would have been kicking the wolves down. Although Dick 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 his animators to pull frames out of Richard Williams' really fluid animation

so it could match the stuff that he was doing on the cheap. And then to add insult to injury, Disney released a film called Aladdin. Dick's work got him the job on Roger Rabbit. So yes, of course Disney knew the thief and the cobbler. You know, you had some of the same people, certainly Eric Goldberg, who did such amazing work on the genie, had gotten his start at Dick Williams. Andreas Deja, who did Jafar, certainly kind of, you know,

a lot of people were taught by Dick. And the final irony was that Miramax, owned by Disney, bought the rights to distribute the film in North America. And they turned it into a film which openly at the beginning of it says, this is a ripoff 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?

Don't fight your feelings Says my heart Oh, and there were songs That were definitely not written by Roger Waters Brian Eno or Paul McCartney. And that to me says they wanted a different film. You know, they didn't want the film they were getting, which is odd because they'd read the script and they'd signed off on the script

and there were no surprises. I mean, the script I read when I started the movie was the script we were making. That is an excellent point. I didn't even think about that. If the issue simply was finishing the film, it would have been much less work to finish the film. They actually put way more work into butchering it and reconstructing it. 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 other two blame the studio, casting them as the thief,

and Richard Williams as the cobbler. And personally, I'm of two minds about it. I mean, I actually knew some of those execs. They would come to our animation classes to recruit us. At the time, they just struck me as so cynical. I remember this one exec was talking about the hero of their movie Quest for Camelot. And he was like, all right, so this is the vanilla ice cream hero, because, you know, you always need the boring, handsome guy. And I had friends who worked for Brad Bird on The Iron Giant, and they were just baffled why the studio wasn't excited about this movie. They buried it like it was a dud, and they promoted the hell out of Quest for

Camelot, which was a flop. And then when Brad Bird pitched them The Incredibles, they passed, so he went to Pixar. On the other hand, there is a big difference between all of these guys and Richard Williams. The artists and the executives always were talking about story. It all comes down to having a great story. And obviously some of them wouldn't know a great story if it hit them on the head, but they had the right idea. Richard Williams never really talked like that. I mean, I always wondered why the story spoke to him. I mean, did he identify with the thief or the cobbler? But I think he saw his film like a Cezanne painting of a bowl of fruit or a nude bottle.

The subject was kind of beside the point. The story was in the way he told it. The medium was the message. He was in love with creating the illusion of movement, and he wanted people to know that animation is a great art form, and you should take it seriously. But if your goal isn't to hit a story point or convey an emotion, if your goal is to make a statement and blow people away with the magic of your animation, when do you know you've nailed that scene? When do you know you've nailed that scene?

When do you know it's time to stop? After the whole debacle, Richard Williams went into exile. I mean, some people have speculated that he was suicidal. I don't know. But he did finally resurface, teaching a master class in animation. And he wrote a book.

And he's not passing himself off as a master animator. I mean, the guy is in his 80s, and he's still working really hard on perfecting his craft. You know, I think a lot of people would have felt they would have thrown in the towel and said, I'm done. I can't do it anymore. Again, here's Kevin Schreck. He, for obvious emotional and certainly contractual reasons, couldn't work on The Thief and the Coburn anymore. But he hadn't fallen out of love with the art form with animation yeah i mean in a weird way it almost sort of inspires

you to always be better yeah you know even though that led to his downfall i don't hear that story and i think and that's why when things feel good enough just let them be alone it's like i don't feel that way at all it's like i feel like like, God, he was, you know, wow, what you can achieve with such perfectionism. It makes you want to, like, you know, climb a mountain or compose a symphony or declare something important to somebody you care about or make a film. It makes you want to live, I think, ultimately. In its unfinished state as kind of a sketch, the work print of The Thief and the Cobbler

is now considered a work of art. So in that sense, he kind of did get what he wanted. Well, that's it for this week's show. Special thanks to Kevin Schreck, Garrett Gilchrist, Greg Duffel, and Neil Boyle. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. © transcript Emily Beynon