Animation Artifacts &Richard Williams 08 Mar 2007 08:18 am
Williams/Frazetta/Bakshi
– 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.
(Frazetta’s original is pictured to the right.)
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 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.
on 08 Mar 2007 at 7:58 pm 1.arun said …
I remember first seeing this spot in college and having my instructor say that “Dick gave them a little more animation than they expected”. Boy that was an understatement, the simulated crane shot in the beginning made my eyes pop out of my head, then I saw the Thief.
I heard the Omnichromes were pulled off the market because they were carcinogenic. I hope that’s just animation lore.