Bristol
Richard Williams, a Canadian-British animator whose work on the bouncing cartoon bunny in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” helped blur the boundaries between the animated world and our own, has died. He was 86 years old. The Oscar-winning artist died from cancer at his home in Bristol, England, on Friday, his daughter Natasha Sutton Williams said Saturday. Williams’ career straddled the “Golden Age of Animation,” which petered out between the 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of computer-assisted animation in the 1990s and beyond. His best-known work may be as director of animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a 1988 film that married live action cinema and cartoons from all eras, a process involved the laborious insertion of animated characters into each individual frame and complex lighting effects.— AP