Richard Williams BFI The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time @TheThiefArchive

The Thief and the Cobbler Archive Official On June 1, 2014, in London, AMPAS [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] arranged a screening of the work print of Richard Williams' lost masterpiece "The Thief & the Cobbler" followed by a Q & A, at the NFT, via the BFI.

updated 10 years ago

Richard Williams BFI The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time

The Thief and the Cobbler Archive Official 2014-06-12 | On June 1, 2014, in London, AMPAS [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] arranged a screening of the work print of Richard Williams' lost masterpiece "The Thief & the Cobbler" followed by a Q & A, at the NFT, via the BFI.

The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 5 WIP 06/20/23

The Thief and the Cobbler Archive Official 2023-06-21 | The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 5
Work in Progress 06/20/23

This restoration is still a work in progress. It contains new animation which has not yet been completed, and is "half done" in this preview. At times, there are unfinished edits and smudgy frames.

"Animation among the most glorious and lively ever created!" - The New York Times
"The best and most important 'fan edit' ever made." - Twitch Film

Here is your first sneak preview of a newly re-restored version of this lost animation classic, written and directed by legendary three-time Academy Award winning animator Richard Williams (animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the author of The Animator's Survival Kit). Nearly 30 years in the making, a labor of love by a team of animation greats, this was to be the masterpiece of Williams’ career, perhaps the most ambitious independent animated film ever conceived. It was taken away from Williams when he couldn’t meet his deadline, recut and destroyed. It has never been seen the way it was intended to be seen until now.

2023 could be considered the 60th anniversary of when production began on the film that would become "The Thief and the Cobbler." 2023 is also the 30th anniversary of when production ended on the film, when a reedited version called "The Princess and the Cobbler" had a very small release in some countries. 2023 is also the 10th anniversary of "The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 4," a restoration by filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist which intended to restore the film to its original intended form, as much as possible. This is also, approximately, the 25th anniversary of Gilchrist's first experiments with restoring this film.

So we thought it would be a good idea to go back and restore the film further, and see what could be done with it. We still do not have access to a high quality HD copy of any version of the film (such as the released version "Arabian Knight" or Williams' workprint "A Moment In Time"). We do have some 35mm workprint scenes, which we transferred in HD for this project, and which make up over 30 minutes of the film. Some scenes were also upscaled and rebuilt in HD, and all scenes were cleaned up and restored frame by frame by Garrett Gilchrist. Any Blu-Ray labels that would like to take on this project with us officially can contact us.

I had often said that I wouldn't do a "Mark 5" edit unless an HD version of the film (in any form) was released and could be used for a better quality version. The "Recobbled Cut" project began in 2006 and continued until 2013, originally. That's eight years of work restoring the film (frame by frame in Photoshop) and building up a huge data archive of Richard Williams' work (Available via ocpmovie at archive. org). I wasn't going to return to the project without a very good reason to do so. No new footage has turned up in our hands in the last ten years.

But I was approached by animators Dennis Van Hout and Kiko Pablo (The Crow Artist), who had animated a few new shots for the film. It's very difficult, without a budget, to create the sort of high quality animation that this film requires. However, their efforts showed me that it's possible. I had just completed inking a Thief and the Cobbler Coloring Book (available at archive) and felt more confident that I could draw and ink in Richard Williams' style. I chose about twenty shots that seemed possible to animate, and began work in early 2023. You can see a half-finished version of the results in this video. I am still working to bring the results up to standard as much as possible.

I also "re-restored" most of the film, rebuilding some shots in HD using cropped DVD sources, recoloring some shots to appear higher quality, removing dirt and damage in Photoshop frame by frame, and doing months of new work to bring the film to life like never before. We were never happy with the HD transfer of scenes of The Thief in the War Machine, which are very red and dark and lack detail. Color correction trickery helped bring out more detail, and dirt and damage was removed by hand in Photoshop over the course of several months.

Other HD scenes were also restored by hand. Pencil test scenes are hard to see due to the low quality of the video. I went back to the original source, and cleaned up the scenes very carefully frame by frame to bring out detail that was previously lost. Scenes that previously switched from one source to another have been cleaned up as much as possible so that sources match seamlessly. Some workprint scenes have been recolored by hand to improve their quality.

The scenes directed by Fred Calvert were done on the cheap and are not up to the quality standards that Richard Williams intended. In this edit I have reworked the Calvert scenes as much as possible, so that they play more smoothly with additional inbetweening. I removed animation errors and improved scenes with special effects, and rebuit some scenes in HD. This work will continue.

The Thief and the Cobbler Except Were Too Tired to Finish It

The Thief and the Cobbler Archive Official 2023-04-22 | The Thief and the Cobbler Except We're Too Tired to Finish It

It's a lot of work, okay?

Storyboards by Richard Williams.