Don’t make a masterpiece. Or at least don’t set out to make a masterpiece.
This is one of the lessons of “Persistence of Vison,” a compulsively watchable documentary about the celebrated animator Richard Williams, and how he never finished his designated magnum opus.
Williams is a Canadian (he’s 80 now) who ran a profitable animation studio in London for decades. Expert at turning out brilliant short films and TV commercials, Williams began on his real work — the labor of love that all the other stuff was paying for — in the early 1960s.
His original concept for the feature involved tales of the folkloric Middle Eastern character Nasrudin, and although the concept veered away from that character, the colorful Arabian Nights theme persisted throughout the decades.
Yes, decades: The project lost backers, missed deadlines, underwent re-writes, and outlived some of its original animators.
Williams dawdled so long he was forced to endure the success of Disney’s 1992 “Aladdin,” which bore a suspicious resemblance to his own work-in-progress.
At one point in the process, Williams won two Oscars for his boundary-pushing work on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and snagged big-studio backing for his masterpiece, now titled “The Thief and the Cobbler.”
And this is where it becomes clear that money wasn’t the main issue with completing the picture. Williams was.
“Persistence” director Kevin Schreck assembles a big group of Williams’ former employees to weigh in on the heartbreaking arc of this project.
He does not, however, have Williams himself — the animator refuses to discuss “The Thief and the Cobbler” these days — but we hear a lot from Williams anyway, thanks to sizable clips of him talking about the film in various phases of its development.
He isn’t shy about the word “masterpiece,” nor about wondering what Rembrandt would do in his position.
Richard Williams emerges as a recognizable cracked-genius stereotype: exacting in his methods, specific in his vision and rough on subordinates who don’t see working 80 hours a week as a given thing.
The completed segments of his dream film show astonishing, hallucinatory images, but his associates acknowledge that Williams never really had the overall story line plotted out, even after he’d spent millions of dollars on it.
Stories about doomed crusades have a built-in appeal, especially when there’s a grand, visionary angle.
“Persistence of Vision” has all that, and even if you know how the train wreck is going to end, the spectacle is hard to resist.
“Persistence of Vision” (3 stars)
An absorbing documentary about Oscar-winning animator Richard Williams, who labored for decades on a visionary masterpiece that was never completed. Lots of clips demonstrate the wild splendors of the work, and Williams emerges as a classic example of a cracked genius; the movie’s like watching a wreck in progress, and you can’t turn away.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter.
Showing: Grand Illusion.
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