Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 American fantasy comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. It is loosely based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf. The film stars Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Joanna Cassidy, and the voices of Charles Fleischer and an uncredited Kathleen Turner. Combining live-action and animation, the film is set in an alternate history Hollywood in 1947, where humans and cartoon characters co-exist. Its plot follows Eddie Valiant, a private investigator with a grudge against toons, who must help exonerate Roger Rabbit, a toon framed for murder.