“Not that surprisingly, given Richard Williams’ obsessive attention to detail and insistence that The Thief And The Cobbler be the most elaborate animated film ever made, deadlines became a problem. The film was animated at 24 frames per second (12 is more common), and every image was hand-drawn. The amount of work that went into a single sequence, the grand Vizier fanning a deck of cards, was astronomical—each card was individually painted. As one of the animators Kevin Schreck interviewed for [his Williams documentary] Persistence Of Vision put it, “It looked like people died making this film.” And people had: By this point, [veteran animators] Ken Harris, Emery Hawkins, and Grim Natwick were gone.”