Richard William's - most neglected - Lesson One: Unplug!

Lesson One: Animation Is Concentration

Richard Williams is a household name for every animation student: not only is he a prolific animator and animation director, he also is the author of The Animator's Survival Kit, one of the most important hands-on books about the techniques and principles of the art of animation. In his book Richard Williams not only sums up his personal experience in the field, he as well imparts the knowledge he has gained from working with animation legends from The Golden Age like Ken Harris, Art Babbitt, Milt Kahl or Grim Natwick.

It is Richard Williams merit that he assembled all those great experienced animators at his own studio in London in the 1970s, to help him work on projects or tutor his staff. By doing so, he was able to gather and preserve their accumulated wisdom and finally collect it in his book for future generations to profit from it.

Milt Kahl is considered to be one of the most eminent of the early animators at Disney, belonging to a group which today is known as Disney's Nine Old Men. Since he was of high renown for being a brilliant animator, Richard Williams used to describe his impression of him as imposing and authoritative. So one day it happened, when Richard Williams was still in his early phase of learning from the masters, he approached Milt Kahl with a question that had nothing to do with any technique of animation: if he would be listening to classical music while doing his work?

 

Animation by Eduardo Quintana

Milt Kahl's answer is legend and becomes the first lesson in Williams' book: 

UNPLUG!

How come that I am so brash and insinuate this should be the most neglected rule? I am putting the blame on a lot of people after all, am I not? Well, when the book was written sometime before the year 2001, smartphones didn't even exist. It has by then already been commonplace to 'plug-in' with portable Discmans and MP3 was maybe just on the rise, but the culture of the all-out multimedia smartphone by your side was not yet established. So maybe you would listen to some music, but you wouldn't be emailing, googling, texting, newsing or doing whatever else aside from it. Hard to  imagine times like these, are they not?

There probably have been some discussions about this topic, but certainly they weren't countless. And you know what? It's all good.
In the end it is everybody's business to do as one pleases, I concur to that. Most people buying and reading the Animator's Survival Kit just skip past this little anecdote and forget it, picking out the juicy bits about animation technique.  It's fine, I won't tell anyone to do otherwise. 

Just consider this: next time when you will be working on anything, whether you are penciling a comic-book page, working on an animation, maybe rendering an illustration and your phone goes off, think about what Milt Kahl said:

 

"I am not smart enough to think of more than one thing at a time!"

To learn more about Richard Williams and his contributions to the field of animation, please watch the following video essay by The Royal Ocean Film Society: