Animation Artifacts &commercial animation &Richard Williams 04 Mar 2012 08:24 am
Williams/Frazetta/Bakshi – Recap
– Having given images of both Dick Williams‘ work and Bakshi‘s, I thought it’d be a good time to post the cel below. It reminds us of what an extremely talented animator and draftsman Richard Williams was – and still is.
This is a cel from his commercial for Jovan done in Frank Frazetta‘s style.
Of course, Williams captures the illustrator’s work better than Bakshi did in Fire and Ice (although to be fair Bakshi had an enormously lower per second budget.) There’s a gallery of some art from Bakshi‘s film here, and there’s a trailer for it on YouTube.
Dick Williams‘ beautiful commercial ran briefly in 1978.
An image scanned from the cover of Funnyworld #19 runs beneath the cel to give an indication of what it looked like in the final. It appears to be a cel from the __________Frazetta’s original.
same scene – a bit closer on the character.
The cel was given to me by Dick. (I also have another which matches the other Funnyworld illustration from this spot.)
(Click on any image to enlarge.)
Dick animated the spot directly on cel with his Mars Omnichrome pencil (no longer available, of course.) There were six weeks for the entire production. Illustrator Rebecca Mills painted the backgrounds in oil. I remember Dick telling me how brilliant her work was while this commercial was in production.
_________________
- Lets go even beyond Frazetta and Bakshi with the Richard Williams‘ studio in the heyday when he was about to prove himself with The Cobbler and the Thief. Let me share another image with you.
When Raggedy Ann & Andy was winding down, Richard Williams asked me, over dinner, whether I would be interested in working in London on his feature, The Cobbler and the Thief. He had in mind one sequence which he said would be all mine. This was the film’s opening – a slow truck into the island where all the action of the film would take place.
(Click on any image to enlarge.)
This was a photostat of this island. The original drawing, Dick had said, was enormous. It was composed of many smaller segments that were pinned together on a wall in his studio. If you look closely you can see those dividers in this photostat. To give a better indication of the detail in this drawing, I’m posting, below, a second image of a small portion of it.
The idea of it exhilarated me. I believe he said that Roy Naisbitt was involved with it, and that was something to get me going. I’d read about many of Dick’s staff and had already placed them on pedestals – including Roy’s work. I would not only get to meet them but work with them as well.
I decided not to take the job. I thought it would be better to remain friends with Dick than to continue working with him. That decision is something I don’t regret. It would have been fun to have been involved with that film, but so much has happened in my life by staying put, that I have no regrets.
The storyboard for the original cut of Dick’s film included these panels which led into the image of the animated city. A still of the city remained in the Miramax/Fred Calvert version, but that’s all.
on 04 Mar 2012 at 9:03 am 1.steve fisher said …
Pretty amazing.
on 05 Mar 2012 at 1:48 am 2.Liim Lsan said …
Awe-inspiring that you held onto this.
Fact is; Richard Williams, in that same issue of ‘Funnyworld’, dismissed outright the idea of a feature around Frazetta’s work. ‘It’s tough to sustain for thirty seconds; and takes forever.’
And I remember that earlier post! 0.e
Some projects I wonder what they would look like with every deleted scene spliced in…everything that should have been there but wasn’t; and The Thief and the Cobbler like that would probably run about nine hours long. All the scenes of Bubba and MeeMee; all the cut scenes of the thief; cut scenes of the brigands; Salome; everything.
It’s animation’s ‘Boris Gudonov’ in that a ‘best of both worlds’ remix of the never-well-completed pet project should be here by now.
on 05 Mar 2012 at 6:03 am 3.Michael said …
At least, allow the man his dream. It may have never been heading for greatness, but it offered animation exercises that we’ve not seen the likes of.
This pushed the entire medium to new heights, or Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin and others may not have flown. No “second golden era” no new life in the medium. Williams, alone, brought that. We owe him full credit, not typically negative words.