Robin Williams’s Best Role
Original art by Ellis Rosen.
Last summer, the documentarian Marina Zenovich joined some friends for a beachside lunch in Saint-Tropez. She was on holiday from editing her film Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, which airs on HBO on July 16. The crudités basket arrived, and I—brave from the sun and the rosé—blurted, “Marina! Williams’s best animated container was Batty, not Genie.” Zenovich dragged endive through vinaigrette. “Who’s Batty?” she asked. And then, with the flawless patience of a master interviewer, she said, “Okay. Tell me.”
This story takes place over a span of eight months in 1992. Robin Williams appeared in theaters for two animated feature films. First, he lent his voice to a jumpy fruit bat in the indie environmental flick , about a tribe of fairies living in endangered nature; then, he voiced a high-octane jinni on retainer for three wishes in the Disney blockbuster . The
