Said Oriolo:
“The budget was [$1.75 million] when they gave it to me, Oriolo Films. After Williams got done it cost four million bucks! The guy is the biggest phony, and the picture stinks! The worst garbage. You see, Dick Williams can't animate. He'll lock himself in a room, take the drawings that were animated and go over them. He ruined that picture. The picture wasn't worth fifty thousand. You see, Dick Williams can't animate. He'll lock himself in a room, take the drawings that were animated and go over them. He ruined that picture.”… Among other things… Oriolo’s own track record in television doesn’t convince me his version of Raggedy Ann would have been any better (or more watchable) than Williams’s, but Oriolo’s skepticism (to put it mildly) of Williams’s craft does echo a lot of what is said, implied, and dissected in Kevin Schreck’s documentary Persistence of Vision.
A bite-sized bastardization of the events chronicled: Richard Williams began work on The Cobbler and the Thief, his magnum opus of a feature film, in London. For what ended up being a grand total of 24 years the production inched along, solely financed by his studio’s commercial work. (The aforementioned Raggedy Ann, the one flop of Williams’s everyone remembers, is never mentioned in the documentary; Schreck tells me it’d have been too tangential to include it and that his interviewees didn’t work on it.)
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