Richard Williams. Photo by Don Fairservice.

When you look at all the books, tutorials and magazines about the art and craft of animation, you begin to wonder how to pick the right one, how to choose something you won't regret almost immediately after you watched it or read it or swallowed it for the first time. Of course, there are the indispensible books by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. You don't need encouragement to buy those. But why should you buy a 16-DVD box set called The Animator's Survival Kit -- Animated?

I think it's all about the artist's credibility. You wonder: can I really trust the guy, who is telling me how to do it? Should I spend a big sum of money to buy something I might already know? Does it focus on my special field of animation, design, computer animation, games, stop-motion or something else? Is there something better? Is there something cheaper? Straight answer: You should. It works. And maybe there is something cheaper, but Jiminy Cricket, no, there is nothing better than the Richard Williams' Animation Masterclass.

Let me tell you how and what I found out and why I will never regret the time and money spent.

My entrance to animation was born right out of the sense of wonder I experienced when at the age of five, I was taken to an art house cinema by my older brother to see the 1933 version of King Kong. Shortly after, I watched Walt Disney's "The Old Mill" short from the Silly Symphonies on television. Done! I was hooked on animation and visual effects. I began to read about it and to watch everything in my reach. The limitations of the time -- I am from the early VHS generation -- only heightened my interest and longing for more and better understanding of that fantastic art form. I also lived in a big family, where Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were regarded as demigods, while Walt and his fellows weren't seen as artists at all. Craftsmen, yes, but sophisticated art? I didn't let it go. I couldn't convince my parents, but neither could they. Luckily for me, I lived near the town of Essen in Germany, where Art Designer Hans Bacher taught at the local Folkwang Academy of Arts. He gave an open two-day seminar about animation at the very same theater where I saw King Kong. Very few people went there, me among them, and there for the first time I heard of an animator named Richard Williams and his marvelous work.

I heard rumors about an unknown and unfinished masterpiece called The Thief and the Cobbler. I was told about Williams' brilliant work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and his many legendary commercials and title-designs. Bacher told us that everyone who wanted to know more about the art of animation should go and visit Williams' masterclass. So I took all my money and my courage and boldly went to experience the Richard Williams Animation Masterclass at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts at 195 Piccadilly in London in May 1999. Keep in mind that I wasn't an animator, but was studying history and literature at that time. I read lots of books and watched many films and was learning purely secondhand. Little did I know that the next three days would change my life forever.

In I went, and immediately met Imogen Sutton, Williams' wife, who organized the masterclass. She introduced me to another German, who had also traveled to London to learn more about animation. Character Designer and Illustrator Harald Sieperman had already worked for Williams on Roger Rabbit and for the next three days, together with 80 other people, we would sit there, writing and drawing as fast and as much as we could because there on the stage Williams was telling us about the nuts and bolts of how to do animation and how not to do it. It was unbelievable. It was everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

Maybe you know a lot about Williams. I didn't know much at that time. There was no YouTube, no Wikipedia, no Google in 1999. I only knew the guy had won several Academy Awards and did Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But after his opening speech, I instinctively knew that I found a gold mine of knowledge. The man loved the same animated films I did, he knew all the people I would never have the chance to speak to. He not only spoke to those animation legends, he brought them to his studio in London, hired them to work for him and let them teach him and his animators. So he not only liked the films I did, but he also had done everything to understand why he liked them so much. And there he was, telling us how they were done, what it takes and how it was achieved. Who was this guy?

The chance to work with Richard Williams, above with a Roger Rabbit storyboard, was an important reason why so many animators wanted to work on the film. Courtesy of Tom Sito.

When I met Jeffrey Katzenberg during his presentation of Monsters vs. Aliens last December in Berlin, I asked him about his experience working with Williams. (They both worked on Roger Rabbit while Katzenberg was head of Disney Feature Animation.) He told me, "Richard is one of the most original and genuinely brilliant artists I have worked with over the years -- he has one of the most vivid imaginations of anybody I know. He has a beautiful, creative sensibility value. He is a very unique, very visionary artist and storyteller."

Don Hahn, who also worked as associate producer on Roger Rabbit, described Williams in the same way: one of the most creative people he ever met. In his wonderful book about creativity, Dancing Corndogs in the Night: Reawakening Your Creative Spirit, Hahn pointed out another characteristic of Williams: "The other thing Dick did, was teach. In the prime of his career, he went to the cinema and saw Disney's Jungle Book, and upon leaving the theater proclaimed three words that every middle-aged man dreads: 'I know nothing.' Dick didn't collapse with this realization. He set about with relentless drive to learn. He found all of the surviving animators who worked with Walt Disney or at Warner Bros. or MGM during the golden age of animation. He'd fly them to London for classes, or when they wouldn't come he'd send them sequences of The Thief to work on. Then, when they'd turn in their artwork, he'd study it and play it for himself and his close-knit team of animators."