It was finally placed into full production in 1989 when Warner Bros. agreed to finance and distribute the film after his successful animation direction for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

[5] When production went over budget and behind schedule, and Disney's similarly-themed Aladdin loomed as imminent competition, Williams was forced out and the film was heavily re-edited and cheaply finished by producer Fred Calvert as a mainstream Disney-style musical.

He acknowledged the film's rehabilitated reputation, due to projects like The Recobbled Cut, a restoration by Garrett Gilchrist, and Persistence of Vision, a 2012 documentary by Kevin Schreck detailing the production.

According to animator Michael Sporn, Paul Matthews was an African-American delivery person with a deep, dark voice whom Williams met in an elevator on the way to a rehearsal space during production on Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.

Many of the minor characters, such as Goblet, Gofer, Tickle, Slap, the Dying Soldier, and the alligators all have additional dialogue provided by currently unknown voice actors in the Miramax version.

Williams illustrated a series of books by Idries Shah,[7] which collected the tales of Mulla Nasruddin, a philosophical yet "wise fool" of Near Eastern folklore from the 13th century.

[7][14] With her threatening with a copyright infringement lawsuit, Paramount Pictures withdrew a deal they had been negotiating, and Williams was forced to abandon Nasrudin as the Shah family took the rights of the source material.

[15][22] Williams learned also from Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Ken Anderson at Disney, to whom he made yearly visits[23] and would later pass their knowledge to the new generation of animators.

[13]: 1:16:15 [21] Williams also allowed animators like Natwick and Babbitt to work on the studio assignments, such as the 1977 feature Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure.

[5][7][14] In 1978, Saudi Arabian prince Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud became interested in The Thief, and agreed to fund a ten-minute test sequence with a budget of $100,000.

[citation needed] In the 1980s, Williams put together a 20-minute sample reel of The Thief, which he showed to Milt Kahl, a friend and one of his animation mentors, at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.

In a 1988 interview with Jerry Beck, Williams stated that he had two and a half hours of pencil tests for Thief, and had not storyboarded the film since he found such a method to be too controlling.

Test animation of Princess Yum-Yum, as featured in the released versions, was traced from the live-action film Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (using a scene with actress Rekha),[32] with her design slightly changed later on in production.

[29] The studio lost confidence and backed out of production entirely, and the Completion Bond Company seized control of the film, ousting Williams from the project.

This version was cut by 8 minutes, featured newly written dialogue by Eric Gilliland, Michael Hitchcock and Gary Glasberg, along with the addition of celebrity actors Matthew Broderick, Jennifer Beals, Toni Collette, Eric Bogosian and Jonathan Winters, and added dialogue to various characters who didn't speak in either the workprint or The Princess and the Cobbler, such as the Thief and Phido, save for some squawks for the latter originally voiced by Donald Pleasence, as well as added musical cues by Jack Maeby.

This was basically the same as the Froot Loops cereal DVD, albeit with a new menu design and the addition of trailers for My Scene Goes Hollywood: The Movie and Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys.

Although the information supplied to online retailers said that it would be a new special edition, it was in fact only a reissue of Miramax's earlier DVD with revised packaging and a new set of trailers.

[50] Caryn James of The New York Times criticised the songs sung by the princess, calling the lyrics "horrible" and the melodies "forgettable", although he did praise Williams's animation as "among the most glorious and lively ever created".

[36] Animation historian Jerry Beck felt that the added voiceovers of Jonathan Winters and Matthew Broderick were unnecessary and unfunny, and that Fred Calvert's new footage didn't meet the standards of Williams's original scenes.

[57] The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers, three Irish animated films that based their style on traditional native art, had The Thief and the Cobbler cited as one of their main inspirations.

Tomm Moore, the director of all three films, said: "Some friends in college and I were inspired by Richard Williams's unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler and the Disney movie Mulan, which took indigenous traditional art as the starting point for a beautiful style of 2D animation.

[9][41] The problem in creating a high-quality restoration is that after the Completion Bond Company had finished the film, many scenes by Williams that were removed disappeared—many of these had fallen into the hands of private parties.

With Williams's support,[41] Roy Disney began a project to restore The Thief and the Cobbler,[40] seeking original pencil tests and completed footage.

However, due to the lackluster reception of most hand-drawn animated films released during the early 2000s, as well as his tough relationship with then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Roy left the Walt Disney Company in November 2003, and the project was put on hold.

In 2006, filmmaker and artist Garrett Gilchrist created a non-profit fan restoration of Williams's workprint, titled The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut.

It was done in as high quality as possible by combining available sources at the time, including a video copy of Williams's workprint and a Japanese DVD release of Arabian Knight.

[63] Gilchrist's YouTube account, "TheThiefArchive", serves as a public video archive of Richard Williams's films, titles, commercials, and interviews, including footage from the Nasrudin production.

The unfinished version was screened at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater under the title The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time, on 10 December 2013, with Williams in attendance.

[66][67] Also attending the screening were other notable filmmakers, animators, composers, critics, actors, and directors like Eric Goldberg, Chris Wedge, June Foray, Alan Menken, David Silverman, Phil Roman, Art Leonardi, Tom Sito, Mark Kausler, John Musker, Ron Clements, Theodore Thomas, Charles Solomon, Bob Kurtz, Martha Sigall, Kevin Kurytnik, Carol Beecher, Jerry Beck, Yvette Kaplan, Carl Bell, Andreas Wessel-Therhorn, Kevin Schreck, and Garrett Gilchrist.

Garrett Gilchrist and Helge Bernhardt of the Recobbled Cut and Richard Williams Archive provided rare materials to Schreck for his production, which was funded via Kickstarter.