Toonal Vision: Persistance of Vision at LIAF
The 2013 London International Animation Festival kicked off on Friday evening with a sell-out screening of “Persistence of Vision”, Kevin Schreck’s penetrating documentary into the not-quite-making of Richard Williams’s would-be masterpiece, “The Thief and the Cobbler”.
I was delighted to get the chance to see this. It’s been doing the rounds of festivals around the world for a year or so but this was, I think, only its second screening in the UK.
It’s a thoroughly engaging film, chronicling Williams’s total and humbling dedication to the project over 25 years, the various frustrations he suffered with it over that time, and the effect of his singlemindedness on his relationships with those around him, both personal and professional. We were told before the screening that Williams had been invited, but had declined and had an excellent excuse – that he was busy in Los Angeles with a new project. It’s doubtful he would have attended anyway – he’s famously reluctant to talk about what must still be a painful experience, and it would be asking a lot for anyone to sit, with an audience, through an 80 minute film that is so revealing of their shortcomings.
Q&A with animator Michael Schlingmann, Kevin Schreck (Director), LIAF director Nag Vladermersky, and LIAF co-founder Malcolm Turner. Photo courtesy of Kevin Schreck
“Persistence of Vision” consists in more or less equal parts of archive footage from previous documentaries going all the way back to Williams’s early days as an animator, interviews with those involved in the film at various times throughout its history, and clips from the film itself, both in line test and finished form.
It’s those clips that are the most tantalising, both because they are mainly taken from low-resolution sources, leaving us to fill in the gaps and imagine how much more gorgeous the film itself would have looked, and also, of course, because they speak of a film that we will never see completed – one which would certainly have raised the bar for standards of drawn animation. (Perhaps it would have raised them impossibly high, as it would have appeared in the last great days of pencil animation before CGI changed the game, and might even, ironically, have hastened its demise as it would have been an impossible act to follow.)
I don’t need to go into Williams’s status as an animation guru, but the 1988 documentary “I Drew Roger Rabbit”, in which he follows unsuspecting members of the public around Soho Square and analyses their walks, was one of the key things that fired my own interest in becoming an animator. In the same documentary, the camera follows him into the basement of his studio where he unfurls the huge, incredibly detailed background of the the Arabian city that would have been one of the showpieces of the film. The sequence is re-used in “Persistence of Vision”, complete with Williams’s telling remark, “We’re going to animate this…somehow…”
Photo from The Persistence of Vision Facebook page (click image for more)
The comment hints at something that emerges from the film in a number of places – the distinct impression that Williams was so close to the project that throughout its production he was focusing on details and missing the big picture. He seems to have been eternally overoptimistic, or even totally in denial, about the progress that was being made in the film’s final, intensive years under the shadow of his contract with Warner Brothers, during which time he was constantly demanding that work that just wasn’t quite perfect be redone. Schreck’s film punctures the popular myth that “Thief” was cruelly snatched from Williams by Warners and the Completion Bond Company when it was tantalisingly close to completion. In fact, it seems more likely that it was barely half-finished, and perhaps would always have been. In the discussion afterwards a former animator on the film, Michael Schlingmann, told of one quiet chap who, it seemed, had been there longer than anyone else, and who sat for years in a corner working away on one epic sequence, surrounded by a pile of animation paper, much of which was yellowing with age. (Giggles and pointed fingers from audience members revealed that the man in question was actually in attendance.) Another animator in the film expresses her astonishment on learning, only a year or so before the due completion date, that there wasn’t even a storyboard yet.
Photo from The Persistence of Vision Facebook page (click image for more)
I met Williams once, very briefly, at the launch of his book “The Animator’s Survival Kit” at Foyle’s, and asked him about the writers he worked with on his films. He replied, almost with a dismissive wave of his hand, that he just does that himself. And it struck me during ‘Persistence of Vision’ that very little was said about what this film would be about. We know of course that it’s set in old Arabia and that it’s about a persistent thief who is constantly trying to steal three precious golden balls, but as for a coherent, epic and meaningful story worthy of hanging such a masterpiece of animation on…? What about the deeper themes that any good story needs? Perhaps it’s unfair to speculate, but it feels as if, to Williams, the writing is there to serve his true passion, the animation, rather than vice-versa. With such an approach I wonder if the film, even with its monumental technical standards, could have remained engaging for its whole running length. It could have turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. As the discussion panel reflected after the film, it may have a greater legacy in its incomplete form than it ever would have had as a finished film. It has after all been the subject of a documentary.
We’ll never know for sure, and that’s the most fascinating thing about it.