Richard Williams

The Thief and the Cobbler 1990 ****

the-thief-and-the-cobbler-post2A few long car journeys with a friend recently gave birth to a new conversational cliche; when you first discovered the internet, what was the thing you searched for? One of the original reasons that this blog was created was Richard Williams’ astonishing animated film The Thief and the Cobbler, which popped up in the amoral copyright-free wild west that was You Tube over a decade ago. This was big news; Williams’ masterpiece was considered to be incomplete, unfinished; the chance to see any version at all was like a peek behind the wizard’s curtain. Williams was an animator whose work ranges from his Oscar-winning version of A Christmas Carol to the bridging scenes of The Charge of the Light Brigade to such feted work as the Pink Panther credits and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That feature led to Williams being given the chance to make a feature with the huge scale of a Disney, or at least a Don Bluth, and Williams delivered a film of strikingly unique tone and appearance. Disney’s Aladdin is one of the Mouse House’s best, and there’s a remarkable similarity in the style of the drawings here. The Arabian theme is bent with imagination, creating dizzying worlds for the characters to step nimbly through. The Thief and the Cobbler has always been hard to track down; brief glimpses on You Tube are your best bet. It’s a shame that at the time of his death in August 2019, Williams’s terrific film was barely viewable; perhaps now is the time to exhume The Thief and the Cobbler and celebrate Williams as an all-time great in the field of animation.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Charge of the Light Brigade 1968 ****

charge

Having won an Oscar for his previous period piece Tom Jones, expectations were high for Tony Richardson’s take on the famous British military catastrophe; so much so that it was the most expensive British film ever made when released in 1968. It’s clear where the cheques were cashed; there’s an all-star cast including David Hemmings, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard and Vanessa Redgrave, plus notable cameo roles for Peter Bowles and even Donald Wolfit in a walk-on as Macbeth. The battle-scenes are also striking in that the use of special effects to create large armies had yet to be invented back in 1968; the action involves large groups of extras, and somehow their plainness is more suggestive of the drabness of failure than the more vivid pictures which might created today. The script, written by John Osborne and Charles Wood, plays fast and loose with history, but it does relate to real incidents, like the infamous black bottle affair. The mood changes once the action moves oversees, although it was apparently the result of budget restrictions that Richard Williams was pressed into service to create animated bridges to inform the action; using political cartoons of the time, Williams creates wonderfully vivid tableaux that say just as much about the vain-glorious mind-set of those involved that rest of the the film itself. Made at a time when the Vietnam war was raging, this version of The Charge of the Light Brigade is a politically astute look at failure and blame, and deserves better than a rather musty reputation suggests.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To the Forum 1966 ***

A Broadway hit adapted for the screen with Richard Lester at the helm; after A Hard Days’ night, the British director brought a similar manic energy to the Sondheim-scored musical and even if the result is patchy, it’s an interesting record of the original production, plus a slapstick chariot race. Several generations of comic talent, including Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton, Michael Crawford, Michael Horden and Jack Gilford, with Lester regular Roy Kinnear plus Brit favourites Frank Thornton and Jon Pertwee in the crowds. Rome is the setting for the familiar story of randy husbands, battle -xe wives and nubile courtesans; it’s clear that the original 1960’s Broadway musical was aimed at a male psyche. A few of the more out-there gags land, notably Keaton being kept largely off-screen as he sprints around Rome; another strange choice from Amazon Instant, Lester’s film is of interest to connoisseurs of vintage comedy, and of course the fabolous animations of Richard Williams, who contributed credits sequences here.

0 CommentsLeave a comment