小偷与鞋匠

The director of this anime is Richard Williams, with key animators Ken Harris, Babbitt, and Grim Natwick. Williams began conceptualizing this work in 1964 and started production in the late 1960s, though the exact timeline is unclear. What is certain is that the voice recording began in 1968. Williams aimed to create a 100-minute, fully hand-drawn epic, envisioning it to be as thrilling as a detective novel. He designed the two main characters as mute, allowing the audience to focus entirely on the animated performances. In his own words, he wanted the anime to be a "soundful silent film." Funding was always the primary constraint for this original animation, with most of the production budget coming from profits earned by Williams' own advertising studio. Due to limited funds, progress was extremely slow. It wasn't until Williams gained fame from directing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" that Warner Bros. invested in the project, which was already 1988 by then. After completion, the film was first released in Australia in 1993, with a global release following in 1995, though its commercial performance was quite dismal. The entire anime was hand-drawn, with even the line work and coloring done entirely by hand. The character movements are flawless, arguably pushing 2D animation to its limits. The highly artistic designs and effects are dazzling, but what is most astonishing is the perfect 3D effects in the film. A sense of three-dimensionality was a core production philosophy, and unlike other hand-drawn animations, the camera movements in this film shift the perspective of the backgrounds! Moreover, these effects, fully comparable to computer-generated 3D, were still achieved through hand-drawing! It can be said that the work completed by Williams and his team represents the pinnacle of hand-drawn animation history. This is also a major reason why the production under Richard Williams progressed so slowly.