Richard Williams was in his late seventies when he sat down to start animating a film he had been thinking about since he was a teenager. He worked mostly alone, on paper, one drawing at a time, in a room that the studio Aardman had cleared for him, with a desk and a camera and not much else. He got roughly six minutes of it finished before he became ill, and he died in August 2019 at the age of eighty six. This year, that unfinished material opened in a cinema in Los Angeles, seven years after his death.
The film is called Lysistrata, and the story of how it reached a screen is unusually complicated, partly because the people involved have been careful not to overclaim, and partly because the basic published facts about it do not agree with each other. Two of them, the project’s working title and the running time of the thing that finally screened, are reported inconsistently across reputable sources. It is worth saying that up front rather than picking a version and hoping nobody checks.
Start with who Williams was, because the weight of this depends on it.
He was one of the most technically accomplished hand-drawn animators of the twentieth century, and among the most frustrated. He won an Academy Award in the early nineteen seventies for an animated version of A Christmas Carol. He won two more, plus a special achievement award, for directing the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the film that put cartoon characters into a live-action frame convincingly enough that audiences briefly stopped asking how it was done. He wrote The Animator’s Survival Kit, which is not a coffee table book but a working manual, and which sits on the desk of essentially every serious character animator alive.
And for close to three decades he poured himself into a feature called The Thief and the Cobbler, an intricate, hand-drawn epic that he funded partly out of his own commercial work. It was taken away from him before completion, recut by others, and released in versions he had no control over. It is one of the most painful stories in the history of the medium, and it followed him for the rest of his life.
So when a man with that history announces in his seventies that he is starting a new hand-drawn feature, alone, the reaction in the animation world was somewhere between awe and worry.
The project was an adaptation of Aristophanes, the ancient Greek comic playwright. Lysistrata, first staged around 411 BC, is about a woman who persuades the women of Greece to withhold themselves from their husbands until the men agree to stop fighting a war that has ground on for decades. It is a comedy, it is bawdy, and underneath the jokes it is one of the oldest surviving anti-war arguments in Western literature. Williams had wanted to animate it since he was young. He described his intention for it as grim and funny and salacious all at once.
He began with a section he called Prologue. It ran six minutes. It contains no dialogue. It shows two pairs of Greek soldiers fighting, in full hand-drawn detail, until all of them are dead, watched by a small girl who then runs to an older woman. Released in 2015, it was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated short and for the BAFTA. Williams, who had by then made a great deal of celebrated work, said it was the only thing in his entire career he had ever really been pleased with.
Coming from him, that is a startling sentence. This is a man who had an Oscar-winning short, the animation of one of the most technically ambitious live-action hybrids ever released, and a shelf of advertising and title-sequence work that other animators studied. He was, by common consent, near the top of his field for half a century. And in his eighties he pointed at six minutes of silent Greek soldiers and said that was the one.
Prologue was meant to be chapter one. Lysistrata is chapter two.
Here is the first of the two disagreements in the record, and it is a genuinely interesting one rather than a clerical slip. Sources differ on what the larger project’s working title actually was. Cartoon Brew, in its coverage of the Los Angeles opening, reports that Williams used the darkly funny title Will I Live to Finish This? for the wider undertaking. Wikipedia’s entry on Williams records the same phrase slightly differently, as a joke he made that the film ought to be subtitled Will I Live to Finish It?. Other listings and summaries circulating around the 2026 festival run attach the working title A Call to Arms to the project instead.
None of those can be dismissed. They may all be true at different points, because a film worked on for more than a decade by one man in a room can easily have carried a gallows-humour nickname among friends and a straight-faced title on a festival form. But they are not the same title, and no source reconciles them. Readers should know the record is unsettled rather than be handed a single confident answer.
The second disagreement is about length, and it goes to the heart of what was actually released.
According to Imogen Sutton, Williams’ wife and his longtime producer and collaborator, he had completed approximately six minutes of what was then intended to be a ten-minute short before he fell ill in 2019. That is the figure from the person closest to the work. Wikipedia’s entries on Williams and on Prologue describe what surfaced at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival as a six-minute segment, consistent with Sutton’s account of what he had in hand. Cartoon Brew, reporting the Los Angeles theatrical opening months later, describes an eight-minute hand-drawn short.
Six or eight is a large proportional gap on a film this short, and the sources do not explain it. There are plausible reconciliations. Six minutes of finished animation can become an eight-minute film once titles, credits, a held opening image and a musical tail are added, which is routine. A work-in-progress preview at a festival is also not necessarily the same cut as a theatrical release months later. But those are reasonable guesses, not documented facts, and nobody has published the accounting. So the honest statement is that the completed film has been reported at both six and eight minutes.
What is not in dispute is the labour. The short is built from more than nine thousand hand-drawn images, all of them by Williams himself. He is credited as the sole animator. There is no team of assistants filling in between his key drawings, which is how commercial animation has worked for a century. Every frame that moves, he moved.
Run the arithmetic and the figure stops being abstract. Animation for cinema plays at twenty four frames a second. A film running somewhere between six and eight minutes therefore contains roughly nine to eleven thousand frames. More than nine thousand drawings, for a single artist, means he was drawing close to every single frame himself rather than working on twos, the standard shortcut where each drawing is held for two frames and the workload is halved. That is the most expensive way to animate anything, and it is why his figures move the way they do. It is also why the great studios stopped doing it.
There is a second reason the count matters. Williams spent the later part of his life teaching, through The Animator’s Survival Kit and a long run of masterclasses, and the central argument of that teaching is that the craft is not a matter of talent or software but of doing the work drawing by drawing until the movement is right. Finishing his own career by sitting alone at a desk producing nine thousand drawings by hand, in his eighties, is not a contradiction of the book. It is the book.
That is a staggering amount of work for a man in his eighties, and it explains why Aardman’s contribution mattered so much. The studio, best known for Wallace and Gromit, gave Williams a large workspace, an animation desk and a camera. No budget note, no development executive, no notes process. Just a room and the equipment, which for a man who had spent thirty years fighting financiers over The Thief and the Cobbler may have been the only working arrangement he could still trust.
How the unfinished material became a releasable film after he died has not been publicly detailed, and Cartoon Brew says so explicitly. What is known is who is credited. Imogen Sutton produced the film and prepared the material for exhibition. Fernando Lechuga handled compositing, as he had while Williams was alive, which means the person assembling the drawings into finished frames was the same person Williams had chosen and worked with. Adrian Rhodes handled sound and music design. Nobody appears to have drawn anything new. The restraint in that credit list is the point: no one finished Williams’ film for him. They finished the presentation of what he left.
It premiered at Annecy, the most important animation festival in the world, in late June of this year, on the same festival stage where Prologue had launched eleven years earlier. Annecy is not a general film festival with an animation sidebar. It is the field’s own gathering, where the studios, the independents and the students all turn up in the same small French town, and a premiere there is judged by an audience that can tell at a glance how something was made. It is close to the toughest room in the world for this particular kind of work, and it is also the room most likely to understand what nine thousand solo drawings cost. In September it opened theatrically at the Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles, the kind of small-house engagement that also happens to satisfy awards eligibility rules. Whether it gets a nomination is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that a film by a man who has been dead for seven years is playing to paying audiences.
There is no indication that the rest of the Lysistrata project will ever be made. It was conceived as a full hand-drawn feature and there are now, at most, fourteen minutes of it in existence across two chapters. Williams used to say that all he needed was some time and five or six assistants who could draw like hell. He never got either in the quantity required. The feature joins The Thief and the Cobbler as the second great unfinished thing of his life, which is a hard symmetry for anyone who cares about his work.
And yet the shape of this is not the same as the earlier story, and that difference is worth sitting with.
The Thief and the Cobbler was taken from him. Other people cut it, changed it, added things he had not sanctioned, and put his name on results he disowned. Lysistrata was not taken. It stopped because he ran out of life, which is the one deadline nobody negotiates. And the people who handled it afterwards, led by the woman who had been his partner in the work for decades, chose the narrowest possible intervention. They did not commission anyone to draw the missing four minutes in his style. They did not stretch it into a feature with archive footage and talking heads. They took what he had drawn, finished the technical work he had already delegated to the same collaborators he had already chosen, and put it in front of people.
It is possible to read that as a small act of repair. He spent his career watching other hands get onto his films. This time nobody else’s did.
Williams began animating his Aristophanes in his late seventies, having carried the idea since adolescence. He knew perfectly well he probably would not finish. He made the joke about it out loud, repeatedly, and reportedly wanted it as the title. He kept drawing anyway, because, as he put it, what matters is the doing of it, and you do it for the love of it, and there is nothing else to it.
More than nine thousand drawings by one pair of hands, and every one of them made by someone who understood he was unlikely to reach the end. That is the film. Whether it runs six minutes or eight, whether the title on the folder said Will I Live to Finish This? or A Call to Arms, the arithmetic underneath is the same, and it is the most honest thing anyone could have left behind.