Richard Williams (animator)
Canadian-British animator (1933–2019)
Richard Edmund Williams (né Lane; March 19, 1933 – August 16, 2019) was a Canadian and British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)—for which he won two Academy Awards—and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993).
His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films.
In 2002, he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008, he worked as an artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015, he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
Early life and education
Williams was born as Richard Edmund Lane in Toronto, Ontario, the only son of the commercial illustrator Kathleen "Kay" Bell (1909–1998) and Leslie Lane (1905–1993), a London-born painter and photographic retoucher. Lane left when Williams was a baby, and he was adopted by his stepfather, Kenneth D. C. Williams (1910–2003), an advertising executive who worked for Brigdens, a printing and design company in Toronto.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1999598. VIAF identifies the subject as 14973721. The Library of Congress control number is no97013047. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 2019, 1988 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Williams (animator)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.