Luckily, we live in an era where “lost” films don’t necessarily have to remain so, and so it’s been a delight today to dip into the beauty of clips from The Thief And The Cobbler that have been circulating from fans online. (Many of them taken from Recobbled, animator Garrett Gilchrist’s 8-year effort to recreate Williams’ original film, which you can easily view on YouTube.) Looking at the clips, it’s easy to see just why Cobbler took so much time, energy, and money to make: In an era before all but the most rudimentary computer-assisted animation, Williams and his artists created some of the most ludicrously beautiful and jaw-dropping animated vistas imaginable. Take, for instance, this surrealist sequence, in which the heroic Tack pursues the titular Thief through a perspective-daunting checkerboard nightmare:

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(Here are some of the pencil drafts for that same sequence, showing just how elaborately planned each frame was):

Or take the show-off-y brilliance of his character work, as with this simultaneously scary and goofy sequence with Vincent Price’s villain:

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Or this hellish, Rube Goldberg-y look at the interiors of a rampaging war machine, with the Thief as the hapless, Wile E. Coyote-esque victim blithely wandering through:

It’s dazzling stuff, and while it’s hard not to be haunted by the specter of what might have been, we’re indebted to Gilchrist, not just for his restoration work, but for hosting all of it (along with much of Williams’ other work, as well as a documentary about him, The Thief Who Never Gave Up) on his YouTube channel. You can watch the beginning of the Recobbled cut here.