Dick's widow, Mo Sutton, has finished a biography including a tantalizing mention of his last un-finished film. Alex Dudok DeWit writes from the Annecy Animation Festival:
"Five years after his death, Richard Williams remains a talismanic presence at Annecy. The supreme animator, who penned the classic instructional book The Animator’s Survival Kit, is now the author of a second book, Adventures in Animation: How I Learned Who I Learned From and What I Did with It. A memoir of sorts, the richly illustrated book was assembled posthumously by his producer and widow Imogen Sutton, who presented it in a Q&A at the festival this week.
Williams “never stopped learning,” said Sutton. Early in his career, he “sucked the blood” — as he put it — of his heroes of Golden Age animation, imbibing the teachings of Milt Kahl, Art Babbitt and the like. Some animated and taught at his studio in London, where he worked on films including Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Christmas Carol. When he himself took to teaching in the 1990s, he thus became “the bridge between the Golden Age of the ‘30s and ‘40s and the current Golden Age,” added Sutton.
Chapters on the great animators he worked with form one section of the new book. The rest traces his long life from his upbringing in a well-to-do Toronto family to his final, unfinished film, the short A Call to Arms. The book describes what he needed “to eventually gain the artistic muscle to arrive at my goal,” writes Williams: namely, “to be able to animate anything I can think of — and make it convincing.”
The first 22 pages were handwritten and laid out by Williams himself. After he died, Sutton composed the remainder of the book from notes and materials, and typeset them with those 22 pages as a template. The book is full of engaging anecdotes from an exceptional career, alongside memorable aphorisms about the nature of his work. For example: “I think of animation as drawn music — clusters of drawings (or positions) are like clusters of notes.”
The Q&A with Sutton brought the book full circle, in a way, as it was at Annecy that Williams decided to write it. As he signed copies of The Animator’s Survival Kit, recalled Sutton, fans told him how much that book meant to them. “The teachers in our country are not very good,” one Chinese student apparently told him; “You are our teacher.” Moved by this, Williams resolved to return to writing.
Adventures in Animation will be published by Faber & Faber in August. For those still not sated by the book, more is on the way. The filmed companion piece to his first book, The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated, heretofore available only as a large DVD set, will become available on streaming in January 2025, courtesy of Bloomsbury Video Library."{
Williams “never stopped learning,” said Sutton. Early in his career, he “sucked the blood” — as he put it — of his heroes of Golden Age animation, imbibing the teachings of Milt Kahl, Art Babbitt and the like. Some animated and taught at his studio in London, where he worked on films including Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Christmas Carol. When he himself took to teaching in the 1990s, he thus became “the bridge between the Golden Age of the ‘30s and ‘40s and the current Golden Age,” added Sutton.
Chapters on the great animators he worked with form one section of the new book. The rest traces his long life from his upbringing in a well-to-do Toronto family to his final, unfinished film, the short A Call to Arms. The book describes what he needed “to eventually gain the artistic muscle to arrive at my goal,” writes Williams: namely, “to be able to animate anything I can think of — and make it convincing.”
The first 22 pages were handwritten and laid out by Williams himself. After he died, Sutton composed the remainder of the book from notes and materials, and typeset them with those 22 pages as a template. The book is full of engaging anecdotes from an exceptional career, alongside memorable aphorisms about the nature of his work. For example: “I think of animation as drawn music — clusters of drawings (or positions) are like clusters of notes.”
The Q&A with Sutton brought the book full circle, in a way, as it was at Annecy that Williams decided to write it. As he signed copies of The Animator’s Survival Kit, recalled Sutton, fans told him how much that book meant to them. “The teachers in our country are not very good,” one Chinese student apparently told him; “You are our teacher.” Moved by this, Williams resolved to return to writing.
Adventures in Animation will be published by Faber & Faber in August. For those still not sated by the book, more is on the way. The filmed companion piece to his first book, The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated, heretofore available only as a large DVD set, will become available on streaming in January 2025, courtesy of Bloomsbury Video Library."{
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