Richard Williams
Two of his Academy Awards came from a single film. Williams, a Canadian and British animator, painter and occasional voice actor, won three in all, and the pair everyone remembers came from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where he served as animation director.
That film is the argument for him. It required hand-drawn characters to occupy the same physical space as live actors, holding weight, shadow and eyeline in every frame of a moving camera, and the reason it still looks right decades later is that Williams would not take the shortcuts that would have made it cheaper and flatter. He also stepped up to the microphone himself for Droopy, and again in the short Tummy Trouble.
The other half of the story is The Thief and the Cobbler, which he directed and worked on across decades and never finished on his own terms. A version reached cinemas in 1993; it is not the film he set out to make, and animators have been arguing about the fragments ever since. Before it he directed Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, a feature whose animation is considerably more ambitious than its reputation suggests.
What may outlast the films is the book. The Animator's Survival Kit, published in 2002, is a working manual rather than a memoir: timing charts, walk cycles, the physics of a take, drawn and explained by someone who had solved the problems himself. It sits on the desk of a large share of the profession, which means Williams has taught more animators than any single film could reach.
Movies (4)
Books (2)
Where to start with Richard Williams
Who Framed Roger Rabbit first, and watch the shadows. Every drawn character casts one, moves through real light, and shares eyelines with actors who were staring at nothing, and that discipline is Williams. He also voices Droopy in it, so you get the performer and the animation director in one sitting.
The Thief and the Cobbler is the hard one. What exists is compromised and incomplete, and it is still worth seeing for sequences of hand-drawn geometry that nobody has attempted since. Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure is the earlier feature, uneven as a story and remarkable frame by frame, and Tummy Trouble is seven minutes of pure technique.
If you draw at all, go to The Animator's Survival Kit before any of the above. It teaches the craft the films demonstrate, and it is the reason his name is spoken in studios that have never screened his features.