My goodness, talk about "dedication to your craft!" Like numerous other pieces of the film, it's very easy to take for granted that, with its lithe fluidity and seeming ease of movement, this something "live" and not the product of countless hand-drawn pictures being put together in a sequence to simulate movement. Not my style of animation, per se, but you have to appreciate the mere work and technicality that went into it…

After reading up on Richard Williams and the Nine Old Men of Disney. Like the poster above said, Williams' career is the definition of dedication to your craft.

He talks about this cut in particular in his various lectures and in his book, The Animator's Survival Kit.

He had been hiring Ken Harris, another legendary animator for studio work for several years. At this point, Williams' and his studio were already prolific, earning several awards for their animation work. Ken Harris remarked that Williams was beginning to draw things in almost the right place and that he could be an animator one day.

Shocked at first, Williams understood his deficiencies and redoubled his efforts in mastering the craft, particularly head and hand accents. After a while, he showed the scene to Ken who then begrudgingly told Williams, "alright, you're an animator"

Here's the quote from The Thief Who Never Gave Up Documentary

"This was after several hours and I was just getting the drawings right and he said, 'Gee, Dick, you're almost in the right place.' 'Yes, well I'm learning from you, aren't I?' He said, 'Y'know, you could be an animator.' And... I was devastated, [...] and I sat on the stairs for a while. I had to think, No... He's right, I mean the reason I admired him so much was that he was the real McCoy. [...] I wasn't really an animator, I didn't understand how to get that snap in the drawings or the timing... I just did animation drawings. Anyway, so I worked like hell in this section with the magician with cards which turned out in the end to be ZigZag in the picture. I even wrote the scene into the picture to use this scene [...] [It] has this fellow shuffling cards and spreading the cards out. And he's talking at the same time. [...] Ken [Harris] would go away for a few months because he was so old and he must've been 76, 77... then he came back and I had this scene and I... we never discussed it—whether I was an animator or not—and then I ran this thing in the movie [?] that used to be across the hall. And I had it more or less right. And I looked up and he says—as if it were the conversation we were having before—very grudgingly he says, 'Alright, you are an animator.'"