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Williams worked hard on animating the story and eventually accumulated over three hours of footage. Shah's brother, Omar Ali-Shah, became the producer of the movie.

Shah agreed to the movie, provided his family received half of the profits. The thief made an appearance in this work in progress, but with a more sideline role: He would silently follow the main character around and steal his belongings when he wasn’t looking. He created a world for Nasrudin to explore and created new characters. While working on the shorts, Williams one day decided to turn them into a full-length feature film. The books were based on popular Eastern folklore of a satirical Sufi, a wise fool who travels to exotic lands. Long before the plot of The Thief and the Cobbler was conceived, Williams was working on illustrating a series of short stories by Idries Shah called The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. IT WAS ORIGINALLY GOING TO BE A SERIES OF SHORTS.

Harry mullas iconographer movie#

Thanks to Kevin Schreck’s documentary, Persistence of Vision, we now know the story of this ill-fated movie and its turbulent history. Many animators today are still inspired by the movie and Williams’s work. The commandeered film was never a commercial success, but it is often seen as a triumph in traditional animation. The edited film added new scenes and music to help make it more marketable, but it hampered Williams's original vision. Two versions-one for Australia made by Majestic Films and one for the United States by Miramax-were finally released in 1995, after being in and out of production for three decades.

Creator Richard Williams never got the chance to complete his magnum opus the movie was eventually taken away by its completion bond company and handed over to producer Fred Calvert to finish. Sometimes referred to as 'the greatest animated film that never was,' The Thief and the Cobbler was an animated movie nearly 30 years in the making.