A story man who became a director, Williams makes family animation that is at its best in the small scenes: a boy and a balloon nurse, a daughter and her father. The trouble is what the films do once the quiet part is over.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in Big Hero 6 (2014) is a nurse who cannot stop caring. Baymax is an inflatable medical robot left behind by a fourteen-year-old boy's dead brother, and for an hour the film is about the two of them: the grief, the city of San Fransokyo, jokes that come out of who the characters are rather than what the software can do. We were more moved than we expected to be by a boy taking comfort from a balloon, and it is because Williams and his co-director Don Hall let those scenes go slowly enough for the loss to register. Then everyone puts on armour and the film becomes one we had seen before.
Williams came up through the story department. He joined Disney in 1998 as a story artist on Mulan (1998) and then The Emperor's New Groove (2000), and those two are worth setting side by side: one leaner and more serious than the studio's habit, the other running on jokes alone for 78 minutes. Story credits on a Disney film are shared among a roomful of people and we will not pretend to know which scenes were his. What we can say is that the two films he learned on were the two in which the studio was, for once, not doing what it usually did. He moved to directing with Bolt (2008), alongside Byron Howard, then Big Hero 6 with Hall, and co-directed Moana (2016) before leaving Disney in 2018.
There is a pattern across these films, and it is not entirely a compliment. Moana has an engaging heroine and water that behaves like a character, and it follows a shape we could have drawn on the back of a ticket. The Emperor's New Groove ends on a lesson about friendship the film plainly does not believe. Big Hero 6 has a join down the middle you could put a hand through. In each case the studio machinery arrives to finish a film that the people had started, and Williams, on the evidence, is better at the people. His own account of story work is that "The story can only get better and better if you’re open to other options." Openness is a virtue in a story room. It can also mean the template gets a vote.
The Sea Beast (2022) is the first film he has both written and directed, and the first made away from Disney, a seagoing adventure he has said he wanted to feel like a throwback. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. We will say what we would be watching for: whether, with no co-director and no house style to lean on, the second half of a Chris Williams film finally trusts the first.
Biography
Chris Williams is an American-Canadian animation writer, director and voice actor. He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in fine arts and completed the animation programme at Sheridan College before joining Walt Disney Animation Studios.
He contributed to the story department on Mulan (1998) and The Emperor's New Groove (2000), and worked as a story artist on Frozen (2013), in which he also voiced the character Oaken. Williams co-directed Bolt (2008) and Big Hero 6 (2014), the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and co-directed Moana (2016). He later wrote and directed The Sea Beast (2022) for Netflix Animation.
