Wow - you've got a PM.

It's already a 3 DVD set. =)

The film itself, doucmentaries and other work by Richard Williams, and if anyone wants the other versions of the film I've got those too.



Okay, asking for any info here, from sources wiser than myself.

From:
http://www.geocities.com/eddie_bowers/edsummer.html


1969 (the film is still about the Mullah Nasrudin)
The BBC produced a documentary on the film’s progress. It is now called "The Golden City."


1981
The BBC produces another documentary about the Project, which was sometimes called "Once..."



Hmm.

Anyone know more about the 1969 documentary? Because that would be fascinating beyond belief, if it were to turn up. It shows the movie at a very early stage, before it was actually the movie we know it as. (Williams started again from scratch four years later.)

I'm curious about the Mullah Nasrudin version of the film, because we've never seen anything from that version, which would presumably have been animated in the "B.C./Wizard of Id" like style seen in early Williams work ... some of the Thief animation shows signs of Williams' early style, and seems to come from that version, though it was probably retraced later.

Also, is this 1981 documentary being discussed here something by the BBC we've never seen?

There is a Thames documentary which we've definitely seen, probably from 1981 or so at that. It shows the film at a stage when it's titled "The Thief Who Never Gave Up." According to this timeline, that would have been around 1982. Notably, the Thames doc does not show "Ziggy's Gift," which would have been created that same year.

Is the Thames documentary the same as the BBC documentary, or were there two documentaries done around the same time, with the BBC one appearing earlier?



Any information anyone has ...

Also:


Need copies of the following films.

Ziggy's Gift

The Little Island

Love Me Love ME

A google search turned up a transcript of:

'One Pair of Eyes: Dreamwalkers' presented by Idries Shah, 19th Dec 1970, BBC Television (UK).

The documentary is about Shah rather than the animated film, but there is a short interview with Williams. It's possible that a clip or clips from the original Nasrudin film were included. The transcript may show a segment about bread.

This is very possibly the 1969 BBC doc referred to.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:YXTX-HF29bcJ:freehost19.websamba.com/sarmoun/onepair.htm+%22richard+williams%22+nasrudin&hl=en


Picture of the front cover of a book on Mulla Nasrudin. The book is opened to reveal Nasrudin sitting on his donkey, facing the wrong way].

NARRATION: Another traditional means of passing on the fruit of experience is a highly advanced form of story with many levels of understanding. Hundreds of them are about Mulla Nasrudin, a sort of Oriental Everyman. A[n animated] film of him is in the making by Richard Williams. Here, Nasrudin is hauled before the king, accused of heresy:

Courtier: He has admitted going around saying 'Such wise men as these are ignorant, irresolute and confused.'

King: Nasrudin, you may speak first.

Nasrudin: May I ask the learned ones a question?

King: Proceed.

Nasrudin: Oh wise men, what is bread?

Wise man: Bread? Stupid question.

King: Go on.

Wise men, in succession (1): Bread is a substance which is for the purpose of nourishing people. It is in fact a food.

(2): Bread is a compound of flour and water mixed at a certain ratio and subjected to a certain heat.

(3): It is a blessing which descends as manna from the heavens. It is a gift from God, notwithstanding man's iniquity and undeserving state.

(4): Bread is a substance from which man draws nutriment.

(5): Throughout the ages, servants and sages have sought the answer to this question. But still, it has to be admitted that nobody really knows.

Nasrudin: Your Majesty: how can you trust these men. Is it not strange that they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?

NARRATION: Richard Williams has been living with Nasrudin for five years.

WILLIAMS: With me, I just found them brain breakers. I was going around heavily about it, then I kind of just started to like them. I found that they'd pop up like people here and you'd say 'That's like….' 'Oh, good heavens….' And you'd quote the punch-line which relates to a situation [in your own life] and gradually you'd like it more and more. Whereas at first you'd say 'Mulla Nasrudin? Whatever's that?' And then [later] you don't get rid of it - you don't wear it out.

SHAH: That's the extraordinary thing about it [Nasrudin stories] it has durability. It doesn't wear out. Why not? Normally people get fed up with jokes and wisecracks.

WILLIAMS: And everybody says, you know, five years you've been working on this thing. Surely, surely you can't stand it: the same thing every day. I say 'Never!' I get worn out on a one month job - commercial job, or something - but not on Nasrudin.

SHAH: It is very, very strange.

[Shot of cover of The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin by Idries Shah].

SHAH [narrating]: The Nasrudin tales which I have published have proved their worth in ways in which few scientists would have imagined. Doctor John Kermish (?) specialised in choosing certain types of inventive brain for the American Rand Corporation. This is the original Think Tank, pioneering new ways of thought to solve industrial, commercial and social problems. He made a text book out of the Nasrudin stories.

KERMISH: The one which pops most readily into mind is the one I remember where Nasrudin is looking outside his house for something. Someone asks what he's looking for and he says his key. They ask if he lost it there and he says no, he lost it inside the house, but there's more light outside, so it's better to look there.

>>So was the movie retitled Arabian Knight in the '90's to cash in on Aladdin? And was it again retitled for video to distance itself from the "bomb" that it was in US theaters?


Something like that. Retitled and reworked to make it more obviously a "ripoff" of Aladdin it would seem. The correct title was restored on video.

Chris has informed me that Ziggy's Gift is on DVD, in a bargain bin kind of release, so I've gone and bought that!



Sooo ...



I got in a bunch of DVDs from Chris Sobeniak, and I must say they're great!

He sent me an NTSC version of the Thames documentary "Richard Williams and the Thief Who Never Gave Up", and the quality is just great. It shows its age, but it's clearly a professionally made copy. Pleased!


He's sent me a nice quality copy of Williams' A Chrismas Carol, which I've wanted to see for years. Marvelous. Combined with Ziggy's Gift we can have a Dick Williams Christmas.

He also sent me a collection of the amazing European animated commercials done mostly by Williams' studio over the years.

It broke my DVD recorder. =(


He also sent me DivX versions of everything so I was able to view it that way.

Oh, my poor DVD recorder. I wonder if I can fix it. It's a Panasonic and refuses to eject the disc. It just says "99" on the front and that's it.


...


=(


Still, there's more happy news, as Chris has sent me scans of a chapter in a book about Canadian animation - the chapter is entirely dedicated to Williams and contains some interesting information I hadn't heard before. It's hard on Williams toward the end, but will make a nice DVD-ROM extra certainly.


Things continue well!

After freaking out over this for a while, I downloaded the manual.

The solution was a weird one - with the unit powered off, hold channel up and stop for about 20 seconds. The disc is forced to eject.


Yeah. i would have figured that out by myself. right.

Thank you for that - I hope I can coax some stories/information - would be nice to hear from actual animators.

Just got in the pan & scan DVD of the Australian cut, The Princess and the Cobbler. I so wish this version was in widescreen somewhere - it would make things very easy, as it's the most complete version of the film that was actually released. One might jokingly call it the "Fred Calvert director's cut." It's not a Williams cut, but I do still enjoy watching this version, as "most of it is still in there" - I put it in the DVD player to test it and wound up watching the whole thing, so hey. (I fastforwarded all the songs, except "Beem Bom.")

Such an entertaining movie, even in cut form. The deceptively simple character designs give way to animation that is amazingly expressive, and actually witty. I would call the motion and movement witty - a word you would normally only apply to words.

And although Chris doesn't quite believe it, watching it again just confirmed my belief that the Thief's fight with Zigzag at the end, even though it's not in the rough cut, was I think something that Williams did come up with, after the rough cut was bootlegged. The animation is just too good in most of that segment, and it fits in with some of what we do see in the rough cut (Zigzag seems to have been tied up and defeated, even in the rough cut).

What always bugs me about this version is that The Thief's part was cut down heavily for this cut, and many of his scenes put in as "outtakes" during the credits ... and there are several scenes in the credits that ONLY appear there, because they weren't in the rough cut yet when it was bootlegged! Notably an assault on the Buddha ruby by the Thief wearing bouncy feet springs, and a longer version of the Thief stealing the emerald (added in the 90s apparently, to a scene animated in the 60s!) ...

If only I had a version of those scenes without credits over them ... tsk tsk.



I watched Williams' A Christmas Carol, thanks to Chris' DVD. The animation is amazing, some of Williams' studio's best. Especially notable is Scrooge - I couldn't recall when I had ever seen a realistic human character animated with so much believability and personality. You really buy it as animation of real humans. (The fault of the ever-brilliant Ken Harris I suppose, who also did The Thief, and the Pink Panther for Williams.) The casting of Alistair Sim also touched me as a bit of a masterstroke, as his live-action Scrooge was the one my family watched every year.

However, although the film is visually perfect, it doesn't hit the emotional beats that other adaptations of A Christmas Carol have -- since we've seen so many versions of this story, there were many moments where I thought, well, that's been done much better in that other adaptation.

There was very little music (meaning basically none - there's a lot of silence), which would have helped it have more emotional impact, and Alistair Sim's performance, although I think he's in theory the ideal Scrooge, misses the mark at times - he's allowed to be too likeable and eccentric when he should be grumpy, and never hits the depths of despair that he ought - the fault of directing I suppose.

They animated things which weren't relevant to the story (flying around at length with the ghost of Christmas Past, purely to show off the animation), and went quickly over points which have been the emotional high point of other adaptations. The ending particularly so. There's no "God bless us, every one," and the narration has no emotion to it, it's quite poor.


My opinion - an amazing piece of animation, the visuals are perfect. This is a major work, one of Williams' best. I feel that with a little more work on the sound - rerecording the voices, doing music and sound effects - this could have been the best Christmas Carol ever. As it stands, it is merely great. Recommended.

Yep.

Aaargh.

I cleared some space on my HD and was going to start work, but ... nope.

The Japanese widescreen DVD - well, turns out it's not inverse telecined. It's still 60i, not 24p.

So I've been trying to get it inverse telecined properly, and nothing seems to work. Quicktime reads the file at a weird size or something, with blurry interlace lines - if I export it from quicktime, using Cinema Tools to inverse telecine it doesn't work.

MPEG2 Works has the same effect - full of blurry lines when I try to IVTC it.

Compressor - blurry mess.

Diva - not quite. Very close, but not quite. I'm assuming the correct size is 720 x 480, but Diva's version isn't ... quite ... right.

I've run out of programs here.

What WOULD work would be if I just captured the thing analog. I did some tests capturing it through my camcorder via firewire. That's fine, and I can IVTC that easily.

But the picture isn't nearly as good as the original DVD. It's much blurrier, and there are all the nasty DV color artifacts which I was trying to avoid - it ruins all the, say, red scenes.


....


Christ. The problem is that Cinema Tools can't inverse telecine an M2V file directly. I have to convert it to something first. And very few programs want to convert an M2V properly.

Hmm.


The AC3 audio exported from the "Princess" edit isn't converting to AIF easily either - I get error messages in all my programs. And the Princess video seems temperamental, playing strangely in both Quicktime and VLC. Hm.

Was able to get a better video demux of Princess. And, I think, a better audio demux, but haven't tested it yet.


I don't know what to do about the inverse telecine for Arabian Knight. =(