Richard Edmund Williams ( Lane; March 19, 1933 – August 16, 2019) was a Canadian and British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)—for which he won two Academy Awards—and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).

His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), 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 an artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015, he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.

Early life and education

Williams was born as Richard Edmund Lane in Toronto, Ontario, the only son of the commercial illustrator Kathleen "Kay" Bell (1909–1998) and Leslie Lane (1905–1993), a London-born painter and photographic retoucher. Lane left when Williams was a baby, and he was adopted by his stepfather, Kenneth D. C. Williams (1910–2003), Williams' mother Kay was an accomplished illustrator whose work was inspired by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. At the age of five, Kay took her son to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a film which made a "tremendous impression" on him.

At age 15, Williams travelled to Hollywood from Toronto on a five-day bus trip, where he took the Disney studio tour three days running, each day breaking away from the guide to seek out the studio animators and being ejected from the studio lot. He was finally invited to meet the animators, who showed him how the Disney animation process worked, after his mother contacted a friend who worked for Disney. "I always wanted, when I was a kid, to get to Disney. I was a clever little fellow so I took my drawings and I eventually got in. They did a story on me, and I was in there for two days, which you can imagine what it was like for a kid."

With help from his stepfather, Williams was already earning a living as a commercial artist at age 17, After graduating from high school, Williams enrolled in the advertising program at the Ontario College of Art. He left Canada and settled in Ibiza, where he lived for two years and became a painter,

In the 1983 Thames Television documentary The Thief Who Never Gave Up, Williams credited animator Bob Godfrey with giving him his start in the business: "Bob Godfrey helped me...I worked in the basement and would do work in kind, and he would let me use the camera...[it was] a barter system".

In the mid-1950s, fellow Canadian Jacques Konig was studying at the University of London: "Dick did not play his cornet and lead his band just for the love of music, it was a significant and necessary contribution to his income. In my role as student president of the University of London's Chelsea College and Chelsea Arts School (1956–57), I booked his hard-driving traditional jazz band for many of our events, and we knew all his available cash was being used to finance his hand-drawn and highly imaginative short film".

In 1958, Williams completed The Little Island, the film that launched his career, telling the story of three men on a desert island; each representing a single virtue: truth, beauty, and good.

1960s: Richard Williams Animation, film titles, and commercials

thumb|right|Soho Square in 1992. Richard Williams Animation is the green building to the right of the mock Tudor structure.

thumb|Williams' drawings for The Charge of the Light Brigade were inspired by contemporary cartoon illustrations

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. based on on Idries Shah's retelling of the Blind men and the elephant, 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 Sailor and the Devil, mainly animated by the illustrator Errol Le Cain, and also animated the title sequence for Casino Royale. which Williams described as "the best job I ever had". Film critic Vincent Canby described Williams' work as “marvellous animated line drawings, done in the style of patriotic mid-19th-century cartoons". The design of the film was based upon the original 1843 engravings.

In around 1973, Williams fell out with his business partners over the feature film Nasruddin, and began to re-imagine the story, which soon morphed into a new tale about a mute thief who is obsessed with stealing three golden balls which protect an ancient city from invasion. and in 1976 his studio completed the animated credits for The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Art Babbitt, who was working for Williams at the time, described his employer's talent: "He's a director, designer, animator, and has a good layman's knowledge of music. He's a dreamer. He has more to learn as far as animation is concerned, but God, he can draw like a bastard".

In 1976, Williams did the illustrations for Idries Shah's English translation of the stories of Nasrudin, titled The Exploits of the Incomparable Mullah Nasruddin.

In 1977, Williams directed the full-length animated feature film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), in which his daughter Claire played the part of Marcella.

1980s: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

thumb|Richard Williams Animation in 1985

thumb|Richard Williams at the 100 Club with his band DixSix in 1985

In 1982, Williams directed Ziggy's Gift, a television special in which Ziggy takes a job as a sidewalk Santa. and in the same year he appeared in a Thames Television documentary titled Richard Williams and The Thief Who Never Gave Up.

In 1987, Williams embarked on his biggest project to date, becoming animation director on the Disney/Spielberg film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Williams was initially reluctant to work on the film: when pitched the idea, Williams said to executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis "I just hate animation and live-action together; it just doesn't work, it's ugly". As he did not want to move to Los Angeles, production was moved to London.

Williams designed the characters for the film, including Jessica Rabbit. He said of Jessica that she was "the ultimate male fantasy, drawn by a cartoonist. I tried to make her like Rita Hayworth; we took her hair from Veronica Lake, and Zemeckis kept saying, 'What about the look Lauren Bacall had?'" Blessed with tremendous energy, Williams barely slept and worked through multiple nights to get the animation finished on time. In 1989, following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams won two more Academy Awards for his work, a joint award for Best Special Effects, shared with Ken Ralston, Ed Jones and George Gibbs Williams said "I'm (in) the same business as Goya and Rembrandt. I may be rotten at it with nothing of the same quality or talent, but that's my business".

Completion Bond then had animator Fred Calvert supervise the animation process in Korea. New scenes were also animated to include several musical interludes. Calvert's version was released in South Africa and Australia in 1993 as The Princess and the Cobbler. Miramax (which was owned by Disney at the time) then acquired rights to the project and extensively rewrote and re-edited the film to include continuous dialogue, as well as many cuts to lengthy sequences. Miramax's product was released in North America in 1995 under the title Arabian Knight. For a long time, Williams preferred not to discuss the film in detail.

Following the collapse of The Thief, Williams closed his company and left the UK for his native Canada, moving with his wife Imogen and their two children to a house in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where the family lived for five years. To earn a living, Williams began to host animation masterclasses, in which he combined his skill as an animator with his talent on the stage, performing around 30 events around the world. In 1997 Williams moved back to the UK, living first in Pembrokeshire and later moving to Bristol, where he would remain until the end of his life. 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".

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 six 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?".

Lysistrata, a six-minute short, is set to be previewed at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June.

Personal life and death

Williams married four times. His marriage to Stephanie "Tep" Ashforth in the early 1950s was short-lived; she was reluctant to move to London with him, choosing to remain in Ibiza. In London he met his second wife, Lois Catherine Steuart, daughter of the U.S. diplomat George Hume Steuart; they were married in 1966, and had two children, Alexander Williams, born in 1967, and Claire Williams, born in 1969. Divorce followed in 1976.

In 1976 he married a third time, to Margaret French, from Missouri, with whom he had two more children: Timothy Williams, born in 1976, and Holly Williams, born in 1978.

Toward the end of his life, he lived in Bristol with his fourth wife, Imogen Sutton, with whom he had two more children, Natasha Sutton-Williams and Leif Sutton-Williams.

Williams died of cancer on August 16, 2019, at his home in Bristol, England, still creating until the very end.

  • Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962) (director, producer, animator)
  • A Lecture on Man (1962) (director, writer, producer, animator)
  • The Apple (1963) (designer, storyboard artist)
  • Diary of a Madman (unfinished, Kenneth Williams narration was broadcast by BBC Radio 4, 1991)
  • The Dermis Probe (1965) (director, editing, script Idries Shah)
  • Sailor and the Devil (1965) (director, producer)
  • The Ever-Changing Motor Car (1965) (writer)
  • I.Vor Pittfalks, the Universal Confidence Man (not completed)
  • A Christmas Carol (TV movie) (1971) (director, producer) (Oscar win)
  • Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) (director, production supervisor, animator)
  • Ziggy's Gift (TV movie) (1982) (director, producer, voice of Crooked Santa)
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) (animation director, voice of Droopy)
  • Tummy Trouble (1989) (voice of Droopy)
  • The Thief and the Cobbler (1993) (director, screenplay, producer, lead animator, voice of Laughing Brigand)
  • Circus Drawings (2010) (director, animator)
  • Prologue (2015) (director, animator) (Oscar nomination)
  • Lysistrata (2026) (writer, animator, voice actor) posthumous release