It is hopefully not to gross a generalization to point out that animators are different from you and me. And this holds whether the animator works in hand drawing, stop-motion, or computer graphics. Obsessiveness that goes beyond dedication to work is a common trait. As is social awkwardness.
The Canadian-born computer animation innovator Steve Williams was and remains so overtly brash that he inverts the latter characteristic into the kind of awkwardness that, well, can often get you fired. Williams is the guy who enabled the effects team at Industrial Light and Magic to build many of the dinosaurs for the 1993 film “Jurassic Park” inside a computer.
Directed by Scott Leberecht, “Jurassic Punk” tells the very juicy story of pioneers, naysayers and professional hierarchies that made Williams both the Necessary Man and an eventual outcast. Frankly admitting that he’s not a diplomat, Williams makes clear his skepticism concerning revered visual effects figures. Among them Dennis Muren, the I.L.M. department head who took home a lot of Oscars while Williams labored in a section of the company known as “the pit.”
In that space, Williams figured out how to execute previously unattainable visions for James Cameron’s “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2” before “Jurassic.” And his work on Spielberg’s film resulted from Williams directly not doing what he was told. “Don’t even bother” trying to make a computer-animated dinosaur, he recalls Muren instructing him.
In contemporary interviews, the stop-motion animator Phil Tippett, whose whole livelihood was threatened by Williams’s innovation, displays the most affinity for Williams’s disruptive way of thinking. The documentary was conceived as a tribute, but Leberecht happened upon Williams at a dark time in his life: divorced, unemployed, alcoholic and convinced his work has ruined movies. This movie ends with the artist marking eight months sober and finding some fulfillment in teaching.
Jurassic Punk
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
