Editor's Note: In August 1995, a film titled Arabian Knights briefly appeared in American movie houses, hardly making a dent in the box office. Nevertheless, many in the animation community started to realize that this was no ordinary film, but rather a film assembled from the ruins of Richard Williams' magnum opus,The Thief and the Cobbler, which has now been released to the home video under its original title. While Animation World Magazine usually does not like to review films in their video version after they have been shown theatrically, we thought it would be interesting to have Richard Williams' son Alex take a gander at this version, which he had not seen before, and give us his reactions.

The Thief and the Cobbler.

The Thief and the Cobbler was to have been the greatest animated film ever made, the culmination of the a lifetime's work by master animator Richard Williams. Based on the art of the Middle East, and in particular on the miniatures produced in Safavid Persia circa 1500, the film was at least 30 Years in the making, and became a legend in the animation industry.

The version released on video by Miramax, described as "a musically-charged animated epic created by Richard Williams, the Oscar winning animator of Who Framed Roger Rabbit," is a degraded version of Williams' masterpiece, hardly worthy of the name it bears. lt is the same film formerly released theatrically as Arabian Knight, a work of such startling bad taste that it discredits all who were involved in its completion. The film is more or less unwatchable, a collage of laughably third rate animation interspersed with scenes of remarkable beauty, leftovers from the original cut. Worst of all are the three song sequences, banal and depressingly mediocre, and a bad soundtrack, featuring the voices of Jonathan Winters, as The Thief, and Matthew Broderick, as The Cobbler. Both characters were conceived by Williams as silent stars, without voice. Neither Broderick's endless plot commentaries nor Winters' unceasing and unfunny monologues add anything but noise to the film.

The Thief tries to escape through an Escher-like landscape in the palace

Unlike Anything Attempted Before
The story of The Thief and the Cobbler began in London in the late 1960s, as Richard Williams began work on an obscure film which was to evolve over many years before reaching its final form. Working with illustrator Errol Le Cain and Art Designer Roy Naisbitt, Williams found a unique style based on Oriental and Eastern art, Unlike anything attempted before or since, and completely unlike Disney's Aladdin, The Thief did not attract full financial backing from a major studio until early 1990. Williams, having won an Oscar for his short film A Christmas Carol in 1972, picked up two more Oscars in 1990 for his groundbreaking work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Bankable at last, Williams was courted by producer Jake Eberts, and Warner Bros. agreed to finance and distribute The Thief.

Work began in earnest in the spring of 1990. Williams and his team of London animators labored to produce a work of lyrical beauty. Those fortunate enough to have seen the original director's cut (much-duplicated copies of which circulate throughout the close-knit animation industry) will be familiar with a work of epic grandeur and remarkable ambition. The destruction of the evil One-Eye's war machine at the end of the film is a sequence of breathtaking complexity and beauty, a symphony of destruction in which sound effects, music and animation combine to create an almost balletic climax. The film, including this final sequence, was entirely hand drawn, traced and painted in the traditional fashion onto celluloid, It is often said that much of the impressive work in The Thief could be easily done today by computer-generated animation, but this is to miss the point. The use of Persian motifs lends the film a graphic two-and-a half-dimensional quality which defies normal physical laws. Such an eccentric vision could only have been produced by a human hand.

Williams, a perfectionist to the end, was unable to complete The Thief on time. In late 1991, the Completion Bond Company, worried by the size of their financial exposure, sent animator Fred Calvert to London to assess the situation. In early 1992, despite the fact that the film was just 10-15 minutes from completion, Warner Bros. pulled out of the project, and the bond company lost their nerve. The Thief was completed from Los Angeles, farmed out around the world by Calvert, and was eventually picked up by Miramax. As Williams' involvement with the movie came to an end, the destruction of his life's work had begun.