Harvey Deneroff

When I met former Disney animator, Art Babbit (who was responsible for the dancing mushrooms in Fantasia) towards the end of his life, he said he had only two major goals before he died: one was to set the record straight on the 1941 Disney strike and his role in it; the second was to pass on what he knew about animation to a new generation of artists. His first goal was satisfied by letting historians like myself interview him; the second was done courtesy of Richard Williams, who arranged to have him teach a series of classes at his London studio, which helped train a whole generation of British animators.

Thus, it was perhaps no surprise that, when he died on March 2, 1992, his obituaries in some British papers were bigger than those in Los Angeles, where he spent most of his professional career. One of these obits, written by Les Gibbard, told how Williams got him to, "lecture, direct and animate at his Soho Square studio. He drummed all the rules and cliches into a generation of British artists--then told them to go away and breakall the rules.

"An awesome taskmaster," Gibbard went on to say, "he enthused about the boundless horizons of a medium in its infancy: `We are barely learning to stumble on the stage . . . the pressure of `time' and `economics' have so bastardised the medium we have even forgotten how to stumble.'

"Art animated Raggedy Ann and Andy in the US for Dick Williams and, for many years, the world's longest-awaited animated feature, Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler, due to be completed shortly. Then Art Babbitt will live afresh."

However, in May, Richard Williams was fired from the film by the completion bond company and the production was given to Fred Calvert, in Hollywood, to finish. (At the time, I speculated that the production was moved from London, in part, "to avoid the wrath of the British animation community.") Calvert, who worked under the close supervision of Completion Bond Company's Betty Smith, was clearly out of his element in trying to turn Williams' wondrous comic masterpiece into a half-baked Aladdin clone, including the addition of several rather insipid musical numbers. The result, as Alex Williams notes in his review of his father's film in this issue, is something less than grand.

I really do not want to get into a game of who did what to who and why. The fact is that something needs to be done about saving what's left of the The Thief and the Cobbler. First, it is vital that steps be taken to preserve Williams' last workprint, the source of the numerous video copies floating around. This alone, even its incomplete state, would certainly be welcomed at film festivals and in a letterboxed laserdisc presentation.(After all, Disney showed a similary incomplete "work in progress edition" of Beauty and the Beast at the New York Film Festival and also released it on laserdisc.)