Cobbling The Cobblers

This isn’t the first and it certainly ain’t the last time I’m gonna talk about The Thief and the Cobbler on this blog. I mean, my grad film (work in progress at this time of writing) is strongly influenced by TTatC’s aesthetics and themes, if that tells you anything.

Most films that feature autistic, or neurodiverse characters at all, are generally problematic or highly offensive. As I type these words the film Music has caused a Twitter shitstorm for it’s deeply troubling portrayal of autistic people. @autisticats made an entire thread about this, starting with this image, which is an actual screenshot from the movie:

If you couldn’t tell already I’m autistic as hell. Not always necessarily proud or happy with it, part of me longs to be ‘normal’ just so that I don’t have an anxiety attack every time I struggle to communicate with somebody or when somebody misunderstands me (happens a lot, go figure.) But I’m not here to talk about my own personal experiences, I’m gonna cut straight to the point.

The Thief and the Cobbler is about two autistic protagonists, and the film itself is an accidental celebration of neurodiversity and quite possibly a film made by NDs for NDs.

So here’s the cobbler (left) and the thief (right.) Neither character has any dialogue throughout the full 90 minutes of the film, except the cobbler technically says three words right at the film’s conclusion.

Nonverbal communication and mutism are not exclusively autistic traits, nor does every single autistic person experience them. But nonverbalism is an important part of the community and something that many of us are trying to normalise and educate people about.

While there’s been a lot of speculation and talk about the cobbler being autistic, there isn’t much talk about the thief being on the spectrum, though this could be because the cobbler is the spitting image of the ‘cute autistic boy’ stereotype – a naive, shy and child-like chap who communicate almost entirely through mime, prefers his own company, is socially awkward, carries himself with an odd posture and plays with string like a cat. The thief seems to share a lot of traits with the cobbler, though to a fairly lesser extent and also seems to exhibit very obsessive behaviour towards obtaining anything shiny and rounded, such as jewels etc.

What’s really important here is that throughout the whole film, there is no push for either character to change. Within their own world, they’re just accepted the way they are and their nonverbalism is never considered a flaw. The Princess still falls in love and protects the cobbler from hostile villains at the start. When the Princess asks the cobbler for his name, the latter simply hands her one of his tacks. There’s no disparaging remark about his silence (remarks that were shoehorned in in the Australian and US versions of the film), since the Princess understands the cobbler perfectly. Throughout the film when the two communicate, the cobbler usually does so through mime, the simple display of an important object, or the shrug of a shoulder. And there’s no real language barrier. The Princess is free to talk, the cobbler free to answer her with a nod, smile, or tear. While the cobbler does finally say ‘I love you’ right at the end to his new wife, the implication is more that he chooses to speak because he feels right for him to do so in this situation, and because he finally feels comfortable speaking to the Princess, not because he’s been magically ‘cured’, not because silence is inherently wrong.

While the thief doesn’t experience any romance, he remains entirely mute throughout the adventure, interacting with other characters (him usually coming off second best), never being pushed to say anything. His communication comes entirely through body language (even when he ‘screams’ he does so through mime, his only true vocalisations being the occassional wheeze or chuckle.) Like with the cobbler, his silence is accepted by other characters and presumably the audience as a valid form of communication.

The important message here is that these characters are never forced to speak like everybody else – they’re accepted for who they are from the start and their methods of nonverbal communication are perfectly normalised and validated. It feels as if characters within TTatC are far more accepting of nonverbal people than real people are. It’s the acceptance I wish was there when I was a kid, and the acceptance I still long for whenever I’m discouraged from typing my explanations and responses to uni sessions in the chat, being pushed and prodded to speak into the microphone and switch on my video when I don’t feel comfortable doing so, but since that’s the way everybody else communicates, the ‘acceptable’ way, fuck me, right?

So both protagonists are nonverbal, check. A point that financial backers as well as some audiences actually criticised back in the 1990s when animated musicals were loud, proud, and when characters could have lengthy two minute expositions about their emotions and motivations, make verbal wisecracks a la Rodney Dangerfield and when award bait singing was seen as a requirement. That some people still insist that TTatC is ’emotionally sterile’ or that the characters are supposedly hard to empathise with because of their lack of dialogue has a sting of ableism to it, as if what these people are trying to say is that nonverbal, non-speaking characters are less worthy of empathy and are less ‘humanised’ than those who can.

But aside from the non-speaking protagonists, as bold and progressive a decision it was then as it is today, if not moreso, there’s also the structure of the film itself – which is not a tightly-bound narrative where every scene serves the bigger story and where things flow quickly from A to B without interuptions, but a film where the narrative is a backdrop and the film functions more as a sensory experience.

The pacing and tone of the film is far slower than its some of its contemporaries, and far more than almost all animated films in this current century. Characters flow from one scene and one shot into the other with the speed of water flowing down a stream in the woods, or can linger in the same shot for more than ten seconds, allowing us to feel every nuance and subtlety in their movement. That there are certain things you only notice on the tenth viewing is what gives this film such rewatchability. Scenes are often completely visual, with a bare minimum of sound effects, without music. This can sometimes give the film an eerie, alien feeling, but I find that’s sometimes far from a bad thing, when the entire point of the movie is to be a visual experiment in how far animation can go.

As the main and simplistic narrative of the film unravels itself in the background, interludes and short ‘mood pieces’ are very common.

After the drama of the thief attempting and failing to snatch the three golden balls from their resting place and unwittingly causing all hell to break loose around him, there is a brief moment where he follows some characters into a chamber and sets his sights on an emerald in a vase. He is apprehended by guards, taken to the stocks and almost has both of his hands cut off for his crime (which he thankfully manages to evade, due to outwitting the guards with backstratchers he stole earlier.) During a sequence where the cobbler and princess consult a witch living in a mountain, the thief attempts to steal a guarded ruby from an idol. And a deleted pencil test reveals a short, almost Shakespearean soliloquy from a Brigand who dreamily talks to his pet snake about a Biblical temptress.

Obviously, these scenes don’t ‘progress’ the narrative, and within the context of the greater film can feel more like filler. But because the flow into and out of these brief moments is so natural it feels right, especially for a film so surreal and dreamlike, a film that was subtitled ‘A Moment in Time‘ by Richard Williams himself. Scenes like this are meditative and allow the audience purely to relax and take in things at their own pace, rather than be impatient for the film to hurry up and get to the next important moment. Scenes like these expand more on the idea of the film, using the animation to explore concepts and experiment with character in ways that seem natural for that character and situation. Given that almost all of these ‘interludes’ involve the thief’s antics trying to get out of sticky situations, perhaps it shows just how charming this little guy can be, even though what we actually love seeing is him not get what he wants, much like Wile E. Coyote (on which Ken Harris, his animator, partially based him on.)

Scenes like this invite us to relax. We don’t have to concentrate on dialogue or tap our feet in anticipation of some big fight scene. In many ways, films and scenes with this tone are helpful to NDs and provide pleasant sensory experiences that allow us to melt into the moment. In the same way that we sometimes watch ‘mindfulness’ videos of scenes from nature, where nothing ‘progresses’, but it enables us to just focus on the sights and sounds in a meditative way. For NDs, we often have an affinity for ‘relaxing’ films like these.

But again, this aspect of TTatC is more often than not, harshly criticised. There tends to be a consensus (probably because we’ve been conditioned by the Pixar method of filmmaking) that ‘story is king’, and that the animation should only ever serve the plot. Characters must be ‘developed’, so they must express themselves verbally, slow moments are discouraged, and storytelling must be a conventional three act structure that doesn’t deviate. It’s as if we’ve come to think of animation itself as so inherently inferior to every other art form that the very idea of the art form being explored and played with for its own intents and purposes is taboo; that the only purpose animation could ever serve is that to entertain audiences with a self-indulgent narrative or sell toys. That we’re never allowed to have animation that explores mood, or explores ideas, or build a world. The Thief and the Cobbler, as well as films like Bambi and The King and the Mockingbird, which are all extremely similar tonally and thematically, defy this dogma.

I don’t know if Richard Williams was ND, or autistic, or what have you. Given his mannerisms and some of the stories his colleagues tell about him, it seems likely, but he will never be able to tell us. People can be autistic without ever being diagnosed and without ever knowing, but it’s far more common than we’re all led to believe, so I’ll bet that a least some of the many hundreds of people who worked on this film were not neurotypical. It’s possible then, that TTatC is ‘accidentally autistic’, that is, Richard Williams and the animators who worked on it were subconsciously channeling that neurodiversity without even knowing.

I don’t always like to make assumptions about real people and project myself onto them, assuming that they were ND when they weren’t, especially when they aren’t here to confirm or deny it. But autism is underdiagnosed, erased and misunderstood. It’s not entirely out of the question that a man who was willing to spend thirty years of his life, often concentrating on minute details of a drawing that would only amount to a single frame on film for hours at a time, having what could be described as meltdowns when his concentration was broken, or when he was misunderstood, was not neurotypical as we might believe. But many people have been diagnosed posthumously, Stanley Kubrick being just one example.

It’s true on the other hand, that there are some things within TTaTC that might go against what I’ve said – the war machine climax and chase scene, with its strong colours and strobe effects, can be a sensory nightmare for some, though this may just be the case with certain prints and versions of the film that have had the colours jacked up. Though interestingly, this bothers neither myself or the many autistic people who also adore this film, of whom I’ve spoken with frequently and consider close friends. Kevin Schreck, a vocal fan of this film, close friend of mine and director of the definitive documentary on the making of TTatC, is open about his ADHD. And of course, TTatC isn’t the first, last or only film to feature silent protagonists who communicate nonverbally. But that being said, it was possibly one of the few animated films in the sound era that featured not one, but two main characters who were nonverbal, and have those characters’ silence be embraced as something positive, even in an age where the unwillingness or inability to ‘speak’ is still seen as something that dehumanises us. Nothing quite annoys me like having somebody say ‘cat got you tongue?’ to me when I’m quiet, or to somebody else when they’re doing something innocuous as watching TV, not joining in on the conversation. And this ‘chatty’ culture is what makes getting up on a Zoom call, or on stage in person, to put on a mask and talk about my work (when I would much prefer for my animation and art to speak for me or for itself, not the other way around) a living nightmare. It’s one of the many reason I dread having to be part of that machine, to try and be a salesman who is able to explain right away what my work is, what it means, speak the same language as everybody else without faltering.

There’s a lot in this movie to unpack, a lot to analyse, and truth be told, it’s probably far more progressive and complex than people give it credit for, but those essays are for another day. For now, perhaps the autistic community should be claiming Tack the cobbler as our icon and championing more nonverbal animated protagonists.

I would hope that in 2021, saying that bullfights aren’t funny wouldn’t be as controversial as it apparently was in 1953, when Eddie Seltzer, the businessman heading the Warner Bros. animation department, said it to Chuck Jones as the latter happened to be doodling a bull on a whim.

Bully for Bugs (1953), lauded as one of the greatest cartoons Chuck Jones ever directed, was born from the animation crew wanting to stick it to the boss they hated, by ‘proving’ through the art of moving drawings that bullfighting was comedy gold. There’s just one problem with that claim: bullfighting, as it is in the real world, is far from comedy gold. And sure, you can dress it up and santisise it, make a joke out of the whole thing, but that’s kinda the problem – Bully for Bugs doesn’t even try to really take the horrors of this bloodsport seriously, turning what’s essentially glorified animal abuse into eight-minute laugh bait.

Am I being too hard on this short cartoon from the 50s? I don’t reasonably think so, but let’s actually explore what this thing is about, and why I’m iffy about it.

The cartoon opens in a bullfighting ring (presumably in Spain, the country people tend to associate bullfighting with), as crowds cheer and a fanfare blares. (Chuck Jones and his team apparently visited a real bullring to record these sound effects. Kind of a chilling mental image, the more I think about it.)

A lanky, self-important matador stands before us, looking at the audience and snorting as if we’ve just been scraped off the bottom of his shoe. The doors blast open to reveal a huge, angry black bull, and after a bit of comedic build-up, the matador cowers as the bull chases him around the ring, much to the amusement and jeers of the in-universe audience.

Enter Bugs Bunny.

So anybody who’s seen enough Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies will know that Bugs Bunny took the wrong turn at Albequque and somehow ended up in Spain, don’t ask how the hell that even works.

The bull then confronts Bugs, the latter smacking the bull on the nose before the bull headbutts him straight outta the ring. This means war, you know the rest.

Bully for Bugs isn’t the first cartoon to portray a rather santised, crude depiction of a bloodsport, nor was it the last. Picador Porky (which I believe was the first cartoon featuring Mel Blanc’s voice acting) was as early as 1936, and Disney made Fedinand the Bull popular in 1939 (yeah, it existed before the Blue Sky feature film.)

So why am I dissecting this tortured bull carcass specifically? Because Bully for Bugs was made purely as a response to Seltzer’s comment about bullfighting not being funny, thereby somehow ‘proving’ that you can make humour out of anything, even stabbing animals for shits and giggles. And this cartoon recieved an Oscar, so people clearly adore it, despite its implications. Say what you will about Eddie Seltzer being a moron with no real knowledge of how animation works (the dude, for whatever reason, thought that spamming the colour purple would make scenes funnier because purple was inherently a funny colour for some reason), but when he famous said those immortal words ‘I don’t want any cartoons about bullfights, bullfights aren’t funny’, maybe, dare I say it, he was right.

I mean, let’s really think of it this way – in what world is forcing a frightened animal into an arena where they have no means of escape, where they’ll be slowly killed in front of thousands of people who find this shit hilarious for reasons that are entirely beyond me, finally dying of blood loss, shock or exhaustion, whichever comes first, having their body parts taken as a trophy – ‘funny’ in any sense of the word? Am I just without a sense of humour, or is it reasonable to not find the act of killing animals for fun peak comedy?

That a group of animators went out of their way to spite Selzter somewhat reminds me of how defensive anti-vegans bend over backwards to eat as much bacon, steak and chicken wings as possible and host BBQs outside people’s houses purely just to prove their own self-assured superiority.

And yes, I hear you. It’s just a cartoon. But the fact that its a series of drawings photographed in succession to provide the illusion of movement for eight minutes doesn’t mean it gets a free pass from criticism card. The Censored fucking 11 were ‘just cartoons’, they’re still racist, they still rightfully get called out. Obviously audiences don’t think that bullfighting is exactly like how its portrayed in Bully for Bugs, since in the actual events the bulls rarely, if ever, get a sporting chance at kicking the shit out of their abusers, and when they do, they don’t bow to the audience who cheers and throws roses at their feet. Their fate is far less glamorous and involves a bullet.

Since I’ve shat on this cartoon for long enough, maybe I can at least say something positive about it. It is, after all, well animated and does have some gags that make me chuckle here and there. The design of the bull is expressive and I’ve always adored Chuck Jones’ sense of humour and timing. There’s a certain gag where the bull swallows a gun, enabling him to fire shots from his horns. This backfires (literally, lmao) when he ingests an entire box of gunpowder. I’ll admit that’s pretty damn funny.

What seperates Bully for Bugs from other bullfighting cartoons that preceded it is just that, though – that aforementioned sense of realism, not just in the bull’s design that makes him seem far more like a real animal than the speherical, noodle-legged bovines seen in the mid 1930s, but the sense of timing, and the fact that all of the sound effects are actually recorded in bullrings themselves. It just has this chilling undertone. Somehow I don’t think audiences would be laughing at this shit if it was making comedy out of organised dog fighting or some other cruelty which people generally rally against, but given that most humans have as much empathy and compassion for cows as they do a piece of dog shit lying in the gutter, I guess bullfighting is just fair game, free from any discomfort.

It does some as some consolation that the bull in this cartoon doesn’t seem to completely be cast aside or regulated to the one-shot villains category – he does have a brief, um… cam-moo-oh (kill me) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the beginning, and unlike in real life, cartoon animals are immune to death.

The issue of animal rights was never really addressed or explored much by 1953, the only films which had attempted to ask uncomfortable questions about humanity’s abuse and exploitation of other sentient beings were Disney’s Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), the latter having a far more philosophical tone to it and having far-reaching implications to the point that it’s regarded it as a gateway film for veganism/vegetarianism. Warner Bros., by contrast, only wanted to make funny cartoons, and largely succeeded, even though it sometimes, no, very often came to the point where they made humour of things that should have never even been considered funny in any context. Wagon Heels is quite possibly the most poisonous piece of anti-indigenous propaganda I’ve ever seen, but in 1945 the subject of Native American genocide and colonialism was great comedy bait for white people. To my dying day I will never understand why it was included as part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection boxset when other racist pieces of trash like Tokio Jokio (1943) and Jungle Jitters (1938) were omitted.

Look, all I’m saying is maybe some things just aren’t appropriate as cartoon gag laugh bait. Bully for Bugs doesn’t prove that bullfighting is a cute vaudeville act where the bulls seemingly consent to their fate and perform pratfalls, but it does prove that anything can be tarted up and passed off as humour if you santise it enough, and are insensitive enough about the implications.

This is the one time I will stand with Eddie Seltzer on this.

It’s Christmas Day, of course!

I probably speak for a lot of people when I this has been an extremely bizarre Christmas. I’m in the same boat of people who can’t be with their families and have to make do at home. In self-isolation thanks to interacting with somebody who happened to test positive for Covid I couldn’t even go for a Christmas Day walk this morning, which given how sunny, crisp and cold it was this year is a big shame.

But escapism and normality can be found in animation. Richard Williams’ and Chuck Jones’ A Christmas Carol (1971) is required viewing for me this time of year and I had the privilege of seeing it on one of the BFI’s cinematic screens on December 9th, 2018.

While this roughly half-hour adaptation of Dicken’s immortal fable condenses many of the details of the novel and feels somewhat rushed in spots, it’s an absolutely beautiful retelling that purposefully echoes the style of illustrations and engravings of the mid 19th-century, artwork that would have been used to illustrate the original novel.

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Many remember this version for Alaister Sim voicing Scrooge, though it’s also of note that Richard William’s son Alex voices Tiny Tim, who at the time was a very young child. Alex is now a grown man who tutors animation students, runs a YouTube channel and website as well as having animated on films such as The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995) and The Road to El Dorado (2000).

I particularly love the design and voice for the ghost of Christmas past, who here is portrayed as an androgynous entity who’s face continously flickers and morphs like the flame of a candle. Their voice is also suitably soft, cold, scratchy almost macabre, reminding me of those detached and creepy public information films of the 1970s and 1980s that coldly remind the viewer of the dangers of smuggling rabies into Britain or playing near dangerous waters.

Also impressive is how up until this point, Richard William’s animation had been compraitively primitive in design and style. Having started off working as an animator in the late 1950s and continuing to make short experimental films and commercials in the 1960s, the animation style is an enormous leap and challenge, throwing him and his animators into deep waters. That being said, though, the animation style is similar to Richard Williams’ animation for Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), another 19th century period film with some breathtaking animation that mirrors the political illustrations of the 1860s. It was, after all, Brigade that got Chuck Jones on the scent of Williams’ talent, allowing the former to stampede towards the latter like a bloodhound on the trail for somebody who was capable of bringing the art styles of the 1800s to life through animation. There are also signs of more daring trademarks such as rotating rooms and objects, animation of realistic humans and incredibly detailed scenery. The animation was also all directly drawn onto cels in grease pencil with no pencil tests. Blimey.

God bless us, Everyone.

…And what a fucked up year it was.

It’s about time I updated here and talked about some of my recent projects and work to come. Weeks ago I finished up my sting for the London Animation Festival, though I’d rather not talk about it too much. I have very mixed feelings about it, though the end result is at least something I’m fairly satisfied with.

Let’s talk about pointalism for a minute.

Pointalism is usually defined as a series of dots that together create an image, the distribution of the dots creating the illusion of shadow, light, weight and tone. Claude Monet was famous for his use of pointalism in paint form.

Most people would probably faint at the thought of creating an animated piece done entirely by drawing every single dot by hand. Every frame would take hours, days, possibly weeks. And that’s precisely how long it took me to create the six hundred or so drawings for my Children’s Society project. I had originally drawn and plotted out the roughs for more than twice that amount – the unfinished drawings lie next to my desk in a box as I type this.

I often joked that it was my Thief and Cobbler. It’s very much true – what the Children’s Society is going to get is only a fraction of what could have been, cobbled together from all of the finished drawings I had. The whole film could have been five minutes long, but pointalism is laborious. I sadly didn’t manage to finish every single drawing in time and my perfectionism probably worked against me.

But be that as it may there’s nothing to stop me from picking up those unfinished drawings and completing them one day, perhaps when I’ve reached the end of this course. I can finish those drawings, I can extend the work and add more. I’ve got a good mind to create a whole feature-length surrealist film out of this. I don’t mind if it takes fifty years, I can have a lot of fun doing it and do it for my own reasons.

And after all of this there’s the final film, the piece de resistance. This will be the most important film we all make on this course. And I’ve got plans for mine already. The best way I can describe my idea is a Roadrunner cartoon set in the London tube station. It’s a British Looney Toon. A Cockney fox pursues a Scouse guinea pig through an Escher-esque warren of tunnels in an empty Oxford Circus underground station, but the pig always eludes him. Though I don’t imagine there will be much dialogue from either of these two characters, other than perhaps a brief line at the end or occassional mumbling (the guinea pig, being a Liverpudlian named Ringo, could possibly sing a few lines of Waterloo Sunset disguised as a busker at one point). The backgrounds will be modelled on Roy Naisbitt’s inimitable for The Thief and the Cobbler and The Last Belle.

I’ve practically planned out the timing of the first minute to this piece of music.

I think my next post will be a look at my personal favourite adaptation of A Christmas Carol and Dave Unwin’s Father Christmas, which are both tonally different, but I saw both in a triple bill at the BFI two years ago, with Unwin and Richard Williams at the Q&A panel.

On August 16th 2019, Richard Williams died at his home in Bristol. The world didn’t know until the next day, and the animation world went into mourning.

I was a blubbering mess for two, possibly three weeks. The shock had a profound effect on me and I don’t think I’ve ever really been the same since. I’m trying to say this without sounding like a gushing, insincere fan girl. It still feels like there’s a bleeding wound in my heart that might never really go away. Even a year on I think of him and his work a lot. It feels almost less like I’ve lost an animation hero of mine and more like a best friend who’s work and words helped me to find my feet and create things in my darkest hours, helped me to find my own strengths and give me happiness with his own creations. I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if not for him.

And I certainly wouldn’t have made it so far in life if not for Fran Higgins, my school headmistress who fought for the rights of disabled and autistic kids like myself. Fran also died around September 2011, only days after relocating the small school to a three floor Georgian building in Chatham. It goes without saying that the end of August and start of September is an emotional, melancholy time for me, thinking about these wonderful people that came into my life and then were taken away. I love autumn, of course, and look forward to all of its beauty. It’s a nature photographer’s utopia. But this time last year I was so depressed I was forgetting to wash dishes, take my meds and drink water, crying myself to sleep at night and drawing cobblers to try and help cheer me up, to only limited avail. The whole thing tore me apart. I was admittedly a bit embarassed afterwards, but I can’t help having emotions.

But perhaps it isn’t helpful to be entirely negative. It’s important to remember the accomplishments and legacy of an artist who, while no longer alive in the physical sense, is immortal and enduring within every single pencil line and frame that his hands and imagination have given us. Watching Dick’s work is like watching part of his life and hearing his voice, his soul etched into every frame of work and every animation cel photographed.

Richard had an on and off relationship with the craft of animation in his early days of making films in Soho Square. It’s always inspiring to watch The Little Island, his very first film, and then go and watch Prologue, his last great accomplishment. It’s truly incredible to see just how much he changed and progressed. It’s also incredibly motivating to hear that he was animating right up until the evening he died, never retiring from the medium that he loved and believed in so dearly. In his 80s he was still being nominated for Oscars, attending animation festivals and working on new material! That’s such dedication and spirit! A real triumph.

It’s difficult for me to pick a favourite work of his, or a piece of animation. There is a unique charm to his illustrations for the Nasrudin stories collected by Indries Shah just as there is something uniquely beautiful about his animation for the Pink Panther movies or Prologue. Each work has a lyricalness and poetry about it that’s difficult to describe, because it has to be seen. One of the best things about his work is that it’s difficult to define his style, because he worked in so many styles!

Here’s are the animated sequences for Tony Robinson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)

And here’s a commercial for Long Life beer

And one can’t mention Richard Williams without thinking of Who Framed Roger Rabbit:

Or of course, the tragic yet extraordinary The Thief and the Cobbler:

Speaking of The Thief, that’s the film that gripped and pulled me towards Williams’ work in the first place. Discovering it is a strange experience. It pulls you into a beautiful, completely mad and complex rabbit hole of animation history that you just can’t escape from. The deeper you go, the more you discover, the more you want to explore, the more you want to find. At least that’s how it was for me.

Of course, everyone in the animation kind of knows the story now, or at least the story in a nutshell. Thirty years of work, bad luck, missed deadlines, budgeting issues, lack of funding and disagreements culminated in the collapse and butchering of a magnificent project that was never completed or released in it’s entirity. Kevin Schreck has described his documentary on the making of the film, Persistence of Vision (2012) to be a ‘character study’ of Richard Williams. It does so remarkably well, using various interviews from the people who worked with him to present the animation maestro as a wonderful, ultimately flawed, sometimes stubborn and bad tempered but altogether inspiring and ambitious perfectionist who wanted nothing more than to make a great work of art. Perfectionism is both a blessing and a curse, sometimes a personality trait worthy of great praise and a product of passion, other times a self destructive monster that ends up alienating others and getting in the way of what we want. In Persistence of Vision it’s all of these things.

The movie itself, that is, The Thief and the Cobbler, is one of my favourite films, not just my favourite animated film, but my favourite of cinema entirely. While it may always unfortunately be an unfinished giant of the medium, it’s a giant nonetheless. Imogen Sutton, Richard’s widow, described it as ‘an opera rehersal where half of the characters are in costume and the other half are missing.’ The Thief certainly does have the scale and gradiloquence of a great opera. It’s often compared with Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey. What sets it apart from a vast number of contemporary animated films is that the plot is a backdrop against the world and its and themes rather than the world being the backdrop against the plot (my disdain for the ‘story is king’ mantra is showing.)

The original film was around five hours long and had an intermission and more characters. Whether a version of this film will ever surface is difficult to predict, but I admittedly one day hope that something that resembles that vision might happen. It was animation as an art in its purest form – animation that existed almost purely for its own sake, for the purpose of exploring and experimenting with the medium and seeing just how far it could be pushed, what could be done with it, how far it could go. It was a film made purely for the love of doing so as an expression of sheer love for the art of moving drawings. I try and make my work more like that, or at least I want to make work that feels like it embodies those principles. Just animate for the love of animation. Do what makes the animator happy, make animation for the animator. While people often criticise these kinds of films for their lack of ‘plot’, it speaks volumes about how animation as a medium is often viewed with such little confidence, as if it can’t exist for its own sake and be its own thing because it has to be a slave to a traditional three-act structure, because that’s what everybody expects of animation. Animation is so much more than it’s given credit for. I never hear the same criticisms levied against animated films against mediums such as painting, live action, music etc. Perhaps if The Thief and the Cobbler were a live-action film (God forbid that Disney gets any ideas!) people wouldn’t accuse it of being ‘style over substance’ or ‘no story.’

I find Cobbler very comparable to experimental and conceptual films like Bambi, The King and the Mockingbird, Fantasia, Heaven and Earth Magic, Pom Poko or Tale of Tales. All of these films use animation to explore an idea or build a world rather than tell a traditional story to entertain mass audiences. I don’t mind that the plot is simple because it’s a plot that’s timeless and easy to understand and doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. It’s animation that leaves me hungry for more and more, leaving me to form my own ideas about the characters and their individual subtlties. Films like these are very patient and very meditative. They’re loose and free, as if every frame is breathing and taking its time doing so, marching to the beat of its own internal rythym. There’s no rush to get from point A to B, or need for exposition or long moments of dialogue. It has an organicness comparable to a flowing river that never hurries for anyone and has a sublime beauty that can only be experienced by sitting by it, listening to it and watching it. Perhaps Cobbler is comparable to nature itself, as is Bambi. Richard’s son Alex posted this video talking about his experience on the film days ago, calling the film ‘a member of the family.’ In a strange way, The Thief and the Cobbler does feel like part of all of the people that worked on it and watch it. In it’s own eerie, wonderful way, it feels less like a film and more like a living creature made from layers of pencil, paper, celluloid, ink and paint.

Much like a fairy tale, The Thief and the Cobbler has many different versions, which only adds to my interest. When I first heard about it I assumed that it was indeed an adaptation of an already existing fairy tale. Each version and edit feels like a cultural variant of an oral folk tale, with its own details that set it apart from others.

While Richard never got his wish for the film to be completed and released, what does exist of it is still beautiful in and of itself. There is a beauty in its incompleteness, like a chipped and cracked vase. What materials and stories have been told about the film are just the tip of the iceberg, and that excites me. Who knows what we might later discover? What new artwork or reels might be found? Schreck calls it an ‘animation fossil record.’ I’m not sure if we’ve even scratched the surface!

Ultimately, it’s a heartbreaking, bittersweet story. Life was often cruel to Richard and his team, Richard was often cruel to his team in turn. It’s a cautionary tale and an epic saga all at the same time. But what I love about Williams and his work so much is that he was such a trier. I know it sounds condescending of me to say so, but that he could have such an ambition, want it so badly, love it so much and make such an effort to do it it was truly counts for me. I tip my hat to anyone who dedicates three decades to making what he wants to be the greatest animated film ever made. And even after the horrible, devastating fate the film suffered, he was still able to learn from his mistakes, never give up, and keep creating. While he did temporarily retreat from the world of animation and refused to even acknowledge the film’s existence for some years, he eventually managed to accept the film as it was, recover and grow as a creator and embrace the flawed masterpiece. He certainly had the last laugh, and it’s a laugh that we can all laugh with. To go through such trauma and still screen the film at venues like the BFI and carry on with new, even better and more ambitious projects is his victory. I’m proud of him.

That all being said, there is still half of me that wishes that The Thief and the Cobbler was the film Richard always wanted it to be, and that it was completed and that the world was able to see it. It may have had a niche audience, but an audience nonetheless. Thinking of what could have been always makes me emotional. The same is true of his last film, Prologue, intended to be part of something even bigger – a film based on a play by Aristotle. What was completed was the ten minute Prologue, the first chapter of the intended film, and some drawings for what we can assume was the second part. Seeing Prologue is enough to make me wish with all my heart that this was a complete feature. Richard joked ‘will I live to finish this?’ It’s horribly cruel and unfair that he was unable to, just when he was getting started and had so much more to give. It’s enough to make me misty eyed and angry at the same time. It just isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.

But I don’t think Richard would want anyone to lament over what wasn’t, what hasn’t been, or to dwell on the negative. If I know anything about what he was like, he would be the eternal optimist thumbing his nose at fate and naysayers, creating for the love of doing so and thinking ahead, celebrating his triumphs and the appreciation people had for his work. The Thief and Prologue are incomplete, yes, but what we have of them is marvellous and should be celebrated, studied, analysed and loved. We can cry that they were never finished as intended, but we can also smile at what they accomplished, pioneered and inspired. After all, Richard’s motto, to all of his fellow animators was ‘Persist! Do it for the love of it, because they’re going to try and stop you if they can.’

Kevin Schreck consoled me with this piece of advice the day Richard died: ‘Appreciate the legacy. Grieve in healthy ways, channel that sadness into doing the things that make you happy.’ I think Richard would have said precisely the same thing.

I accept the fact that thinking of him, especially now, makes me emotional. I’m not ashamed to shed tears. But if anything, that grief shows just what a positive impact his work had on me, and I should be grateful for it’s existence. I’ll always think of how happy his films make me, and how glad I am for their existence. Complete or not, they were worth making and fighting for.

Many of us in the animation world are thinking of him now, still, after a year. How could we not, around the anniversary of his passing? People are still talking about, paying their respects and writing articles like this one:
https://pullingarabbitoutofahat.com/the-story-continues/remembering-richard-williams/

We might all remember August 16th as the day we lost him, but maybe that goes to show just how much love we had for him, and we should always keep in mind that love comes from a place of positivity. This article in particular talks about a memorial Alex Williams has organised, though postponed thanks to the Covid 19 climate, which in a strange way, makes me feel quite excited – a true celebration of Richard’s life, his trials, tribulations, and contributions! I’m unsure if this is an event that for invites only, but I very much hope that when it does happen, I will be able to attend and come together with others who were positively affected by him. It might be cliche to say that the historians, animators and fans are something of a strange family, but I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t made some great friends thanks to my interest in The Thief and the Cobbler. And just as exciting, the article hints at an autobiography by the maestro to be posthumously completed. It’s cynical to say that people only seem to care about artists once they die. Perhaps there is a flicker of truth in that assumption, that we often take the living for granted. But that people still come together in their love and appreciation of a man’s creations and legacy is always a great thing, whether that man is alive or not. It’s human nature, perhaps, to value and miss someone even more when you no longer have them.

Speaking of autobiographies, I’ve been working on a book of my own about Richard William’s animation, especially the history of The Thief and the Cobbler. Of course, for some time now it’s been on a slight hiatus since attending this master’s degree, travelling backwards and forwards from London, etc. When Dick died, I promised myself that I would work hard on it. Of course, I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week, and looking for more research material. I’ve been on a cobbler binge and I’m all fired up again!

I owe Dick a great deal of gratitude for a lot of things, from helping me to find my own animation styles and themes, inspiring me to create, helping me to make friends and being the person to initially lead me to Neil Boyle, who is now something of a penpal of mine. Oh, and that’s not forgetting Tack the cobbler himself, who has given me plenty of happiness and comfort.

When I animate, I’ll think dearly of him. I’ll also think dearly of the animation legends of whom upon the shoulders he stood – Ken Harris, Grim Natwick, Milt Kahl, Art Babbit, Emery Hawkins. They aided and nurtured him, and in turn, Richard did the same for others. I’ll tell his story in my book, help to inspire others and spread the word of his work, encouraging others. I’ll do my best to try and be as great as he and his teachers were as animators. And I’ll definitely do as much life drawing as I can!

I’ll smile, I’ll cry. His story and legacy is inherently moving, animation as an art form is inherently a rather emotional and tearjerking art form. I’ll regret what never happened and what could have been if not for whatever, but I’ll also use those tears to make great things. I wish he could have been with us for much longer and given more of a chance. His energy and passion was far too good to just die as it did. But perhaps Richard Williams will never truly die as long as his creations live on and are loved by millions. It sounds cheesy, but he lives in all of us, in the very art of animation itself. I’m not religious, but perhaps it’s comforting to think that Richard is now reunited with his own animation idols. I remember on the night of 17th August last year, when I was grieving after the announcement of his passing, a bird flew through the back door, into the living room, and then out again, startling me. Rationally, it was nothing more than a confused animal. But it’s lovely to imagine that perhaps this was his way of saying goodbye. That probably sounds so corny, but I type this right now with tears sliding down my face.

Of course I miss him, and always will. Those feelings will always have an affect on me. But I’m so grateful for the legacy and his creations, and the happiness, comfort, laughter and tears that they’ve given me. We’ll mourn and celebrate, we’ll keep animating. For every tear, there will be a smile.

Persist.

I have a Facebook page dedicated to uploading every single frame of Richard Williams’ animation in order. Yes, this is how I’ve chosen to spend lockdown and I have no regrets.

I’m in the process of uploading the frames of the Pink Panther dancing in the opening title sequence of The Return of the Pink Panther (1976) and while the sequence itself is beautiful in motion, viewing the frames as individual pieces of a whole is pretty astounding.

Dance animation is something I have a strong interest in (I’ve long been wanting to animate stuff to jazz music), so stuff like this is great study material. I can only hope to one day animate as gracefully as this. Each pose is incredibly strong as its own silhouette and moves beautifully. Though Richard himself doesn’t own the rights to the panther, he reused the dance animation as a tutorial in The Animator’s Surival Kit.

Here’s the full sequence in its entirely, moving as it was intended (along with the ending credits at the end).

God damn it, what must I do to animate as well as this??

Pigs are flying outside, so I finally decided to update my blog. I realised that the previous three entries have been rather pessimistic, so here’s some recent life drawings from those Zoom sessions:

I’m honestly glad I paid for these, despite the technical issues at the start.

I don’t usually post my own photography on this blog, but if it were not for the invention of the film camera, cinema and animation itself would not exist. Plus, it’s creative, so I suppose it’s fairly relevant.

These were all taken with a Canon 2000D in the past three months, around Alexandra Park and St Helen’s Woods in Hastings. I’m glad I’ve had more time to get out and do it thanks to lockdown etc, but my only gripe is that I’ve only really been able to go to places within walking distance, thanks to trains and buses running a limited service (as well as comolusory mask-wearing now!)

I’m toying with the idea of perhaps seeing if I can make it and back to St James Park or Regent’s Park on the train next month, just to get into the swing of things a bit better.

…. Well… Shit…

I’ve neglected this blog for around two months and I think now a new post is long overdue. I forgot this thing even existed. My last proper contribution is a post on Anifest that I started working on at the beginning of March, and it’s still in draft form, unfinished and gathering dust.

I think it goes without saying that the world is in a real sorry state and nothing really makes a lot of sense anymore. I’ve been suffering from a long phase of depression that just seems to keep going. It would be easy for me to blame it on Covid 19, quarantine and lockdown, but I think it goes deeper than that. I’m not having to make a three hour journey to London every day, but yet I still feel trapped and emotionally drained. I am at least pleased that doing classes from my bedroom is refreshing and means that I don’t have to wake up at six in the morning. But working for others is difficult. I don’t get people. I don’t like them. I don’t understand them.

I have to admit that my reasons for being an animator and artist in general are purely selfish. I saw animation as a protest against the world. A way of me having control over something and not having to deal with real people and real scenarios. I wanted to make things purely for my enjoyment, not for others. I don’t really care about appeasing audiences or appealing to them. I see animation as an escape from a world that’s always been particularly cruel and hostile, much in the same way I see the forests and lakes as an escape from humans. I understand animation. I understand nature. But I will never understand people, nor will they ever understand me.

That’s ultimately why I’m having some trouble with this Children’s Society commission. It’s not that I don’t have an idea – the idea is in my head and partly in animatic form. But having to communicate certain ideas to other people is hell for me, because most of the time I just can’t explain things and it gives me anxiety to do so knowing that they won’t take well to it. I hate being like this sometimes. I hate that I have to speak a certain language and do things one way just so that everyone will ‘get it’, even though I know they won’t and will only get angry with me.

The basic idea in writing is a slow truck into a multiplane, black and white surreal landscape before things blur and fade into ‘another dimension’ – I want a hand-drawn sequence for this, on ones, straight ahead. I don’t really know exactly what will happen other than shapes will morph into one another and everything will be very dreamlike. To storyboard and plan exactly what will happen is to miss the point and take the fun out of it – I want to animate my own stream of consciousness and play things by ear and improvise. Having to draw storyboards for that sequence and having to follow them exactly without the opportunity to experiment would be too restrictive. I can very much see why Richard Williams didn’t care for storyboards back when he worked on The Thief and the Cobbler. But the industry sadly didn’t care for him. He spoke his own language and nobody really understood it. I can relate to that.

I know what my idea is. I know how it will play out, and when it’s done, it should look impressive and I should be proud of it, unlike a lot of the things I work on. But everybody wants to know before I’ve even done it. Me knowing by myself and having it in my head isn’t enough, because I feel like I’m not being trusted here and just left to my own devices.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever be sucessful if this is the case. We’re all forced into a world where we have to, or are at least prodded and coerced, into working and talking to others, and communicating verbally. I almost dread to think of how society would treat a character like Tack – a character that almost never talks and communicates only through body language. Just look at how we treat nonhuman animals and the mute. Differences and deviation from the norm is punished and not tolerated. I don’t speak the same language as everybody else and everybody expects me to do so. I would never survive a boardroom meeting or anything else that requires talking or working on behalf of others. Most of the time I just want to be alone away from the insanities of modern life. I envsion a future where I could just live in a cottage in the woods making art and films by myself and not having to bend to the whims of executives or worrying about money. But money is king in this world and it’s treated like oxygen – nobody can really live without it.

I don’t want to end this post on a depressing chord, so here are some cute cobblers.