A Monolithic Figure

The link between Grim Natwick and Richard Williams.

A still from Snow White (1937)

Welcome! We’re here with another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Today, we’re talking about one of the great animators.

A book finally reached the States last month: Adventures in Animation. It was the last by Richard Williams, the Roger Rabbit artist. He co-wrote it with Imogen Sutton (his wife), and she finished their work after his death.

It’s a valuable piece of history. The book covers Williams’ life: its subtitle is How I Learned, Who I Learned From and What I Did with It, which isn’t a short story. We hear about his famous trip to the Disney studio in the ‘40s, as a teenager — and his jazz career, and the early days of his own studio, and his turn away from modern cartoons.

Key to the tale are Williams’ influences. He was a fan first; often, he could guess who’d animated a Disney or Warner shot by sight.¹ During the ‘70s, he surrounded himself with veterans of the industry — people from Snow White and even earlier — and absorbed what they knew. Many held lectures for his team in London.

Adventures in Animation dedicates long sections to these artists. And the most senior among them was Grim Natwick. He was a lead on Snow White, and the creator of Betty Boop. But he’d started in the 1910s, as one of the first-wave American animators. Natwick helped to build the medium itself.

Grim Natwick (right) with Richard Williams in the 1970s, courtesy of Adventures in Animation