go "very personal" when he has achieved his other goals in animated features. Three such intimate films have been on and off the burner for years,
I. Vor Pitt/olks , the Universal Confidence Man; Circus Drawings, inspired by his days in Spain; and My Pretty Girl, based on a Bix Beiderbecke recording. Williams's magnum opus, the ultimate synthesis of the skill of the Disney studio and the style of th e Independents, has been in preparation for twelve years and has, he figures, two and a half more years to go. This is the feature-length animated cartoon called The Thief and the Cobbler, w hich Williams once promised will be "the War and Peace of animati on!" He has also claimed that The Thief is "going to be the greatest animated film ever made ." There is a bit of Barnum in Williams, who admits, "I am shameless when it comes to publicity," butthis is phase three of Wi ll iams' master p lan. He truly believes the film w ill "redefine the medium ," and he has been pouring every cent of prafit fram his stud io's TV commercial revenue into it. There is hardly a conversation shared \(Vith the man in wh ich The Thief is not mentioned, at least in passing. Will iams eXCitedl y tries to explai n why this will be the one , 'The Thief is not following the Disney route. It's to my knowledge the first animated film with a real pl ot th at locks together like a detective story at the end. It has no sentimentality, and th e two main characters don't speak. It's like a silent movie with a lot of sound." Dick Wi lliams was still trying to attract financial backers for his masterwork, wh ile his staff of forty experimented with different techniques and approaches to characters on the approximately one hundred forty TV commercials they produce each year, when, three years ago, Raggedy Ann reared her charmin g little head and offered Wi lliams the opportunity to use his hard-earned directorial expertise in ITT's multimillion-dollar venture. In the winter of 1973, Lester Osterman was in London on business; he ca lled on Richard Williams at his studio to ask him to consider directing an animated feature based on the Ragg edy Ann and Andy stories. Wi lli ams's I
first impulse was to answer No, and he recommended John Hubley. He'd never heard of Osterman. But Osterman left a script and a tape of music with Williams overnight. Willi ams immediately rang up his friend Tony Walton, the famed set and costume deSigner, who informed him that Osterman was indeed a legitimate Broadway producer/theater owner "who was always solid for money" Still wary, Williams read the script. He found, to his surprise, that he "couldn't find anything wrong with it! I kept looking for the terribl e things, and there weren't any." The script was deliberately left loose to allow for visual development. Williams took it around to Walton, who was working as art director on Murder on the Orient Express, a feature Williams was providing titles for. Walton thought the same thing, the script wasn't really there, but there was
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