Richard Edmund Williams (né Lane; March 19, 1933 – August 16, 2019) was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter.

(1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films.

Williams grew up on Golfdale Road, a suburban street in Toronto, where he and his childhood friend Martin Hunter put on magic shows and comedy acts for the local neighbourhood: "We collected $16.25, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice".

One of his classmates, Lars Thompson, recalled: "Under the name of Ivan Yurpee, [Dick] played a trumpet in a band of fellow zanies.

"[8] With help from his stepfather, Williams was already earning a living as a commercial artist at age 17,[9] creating advertisements for companies such as Dr. Ballard's Pet Food.

[13] He left Canada and settled in Ibiza, where he lived for two years and became a painter,[4] finding inspiration in the clowns and performers at a local circus.

In 1955, Williams left Ibiza and moved to England, where he began working at fellow Canadian George Dunning's company, T.V.

[15] In the mid-1950s, fellow Canadian Jacques Konig was studying at the University of London: "Dick did not play his cornet and lead his band just for the love of music, it was a significant and necessary contribution to his income.

[14] In 1968 his studio won accolades for the animated segments in Tony Richardson's epic feature film about the Crimean War, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968),[22] which Williams described as "the best job I ever had".

Film critic Vincent Canby described Williams' work as “marvellous animated line drawings, done in the style of patriotic mid-19th-century cartoons".

[6] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Williams hired and brought to London a number of the great Hollywood animators from the 1930s, elderly men who were by then nearing retirement.

These included Art Babbitt (Goofy), Grim Natwick (Betty Boop), and Ken Harris (Wile E. Coyote).

[24] In around 1973, Williams fell out with his business partners over the feature film Nasruddin, and began to re-imagine the story, which soon morphed into a new tale about a mute thief who is obsessed with stealing three golden balls which protect an ancient city from invasion.

[26] Art Babbitt, who was working for Williams at the time, described his employer's talent: "He's a director, designer, animator, and has a good layman's knowledge of music.

[27] In 1976, Williams did the illustrations for Idries Shah's English translation of the stories of Nasrudin, titled The Exploits of the Incomparable Mullah Nasruddin.

[28] In 1977, Williams directed the full-length animated feature film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), in which his daughter Claire played the part of Marcella.

[9] The film won an Emmy Award,[9] and in the same year he appeared in a Thames Television documentary titled Richard Williams and The Thief Who Never Gave Up.

[31] Disney and Spielberg promised Williams that in return for doing the film, they would help finance and distribute the still-unfinished The Thief and the Cobbler.

Blessed with tremendous energy, Williams barely slept and worked through multiple nights to get the animation finished on time.

[4] Richard Williams' magnum opus, a painstakingly hand-animated epic inspired by the Arabian Nights and with the production title The Thief and the Cobbler, was begun in 1964 and was initially self-funded.

Miramax (which was owned by Disney at the time) then acquired rights to the project and extensively rewrote and re-edited the film to include continuous dialogue, as well as many cuts to lengthy sequences.

Following the collapse of The Thief, Williams closed his company and left the UK for his native Canada, moving with his wife Imogen and their two children to a house in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where the family lived for five years.

[6] Aardman co-founder Peter Lord described Williams as exemplifying "pure creativity, he seemed to us to work without compromise and for the sheer love of his chosen art-form.

[38] On December 10, 2013, the director's cut of The Thief and the Cobbler, a workprint of the film, subtitled "A Moment in Time", was screened in Los Angeles.

Prologue was the first six minutes of his hand-drawn feature film Lysistrata, based on the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, which Williams joked should be sub-titled "Will I Live to Finish It?".

His marriage to Stephanie "Tep" Ashforth in the early 1950s was short-lived; she was reluctant to move to London with him, choosing to remain in Ibiza.