Persistence of Vision: The Greatest Animated Film Never Made

This post was written by DOC NYC blogger Maggie Glass.

Director Kevin Schleck speaks at the screening of his film Persistence of Vision. Photo by Simon Luethi.

Early on in Kevin Schreck’s PERSISTENCE OF VISION, legendary animator Richard Williams lays out plainly, but exquisitely, the value of animation: “It is capable of doing anything.” As his career grew in the 1960’s and 70’s, Williams took animation’s extraordinary possibilities to heart, pushing the boundaries of the medium while supporting himself financially with commercial work.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION is a look at Williams’s unfinished masterpiece, a film of incredible detail and artistry that almost consumed his life. Schreck’s documentary maintains a bit of the mystique surrounding the film, but mostly by necessity. To this day, Williams refuses to discuss the film and his feelings about its not-so-quiet demise. However, Schreck has no trouble filling in the gaps, using archival footage and interviews with Williams’s crew of animators to draw a compelling portrait of an immensely talented man with–some might say–oversized ambitions.

And yet, PERSISTENCE OF VISION is not solely a portrait of an eccentric man and an ill-fated dream. It is also an ode to an art form that by now is all but obsolete. Behind-the-scenes footage reveals endless pencil tests and painted cels: artifacts of a bygone era of animation. Former colleagues of Williams remember a perfectionist who demanded the very best from his artists and wasn’t afraid to order entire sequences be re-drawn over and over until they were exactly right.

This partly comes as no surprise–by its very nature, traditional animation requires painstaking work and obsessive attention to detail. But by all accounts, Richard Williams was unique in his vision to create a feature animated film that was truly a work of art, an alternative to the homogenous cartoon musicals that dotted the media landscape at the time. Even then, some of his fellow artists recognized hand-drawn animation as a craft that might die out. To them, Williams’ dedication made him a kind of savior.

Williams’s film THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER, which he worked on for three decades, was never finished. And to delve into the detail of what exactly became of his work would spoil the surprisingly suspenseful and moving narrative Schreck has woven. After the film, Schreck spoke to the audience, revealing that even he had a moment where his own project might be left unfinished.

When he began PERSISTENCE OF VISION, he knew intellectually that Williams would refuse to participate, but still retained a shred of hope. He was in London during the early stages of shooting when an esteemed animator and friend of Williams’s confirmed quite solidly that Williams would have nothing to do with the project. “I remember walking down the street, just comatose,” Schreck said. “I felt like a parasite, like I was bothering this old man who just wanted to be left alone. I turned to Sarah, my line producer, and said, ‘Maybe we should just stop.’ She reminded me that we knew all along Richard would say no. But literally everyone else said yes. And they all thought that this was a story that should be told.’”

Maggie Glass is a New York-based writer and Senior Educator at Museum of the Moving Image.