Williams grew up on Golfdale Road, a suburban street in Toronto, where he and his childhood friend Martin Hunter put on magic shows and comedy acts for the local neighbourhood: "we collected "$16.25, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice". Williams' mother Kay was an accomplished illustrator whose work was inspired by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. Kay read her son the stories of the Arabian Nights, which would later inspire his magnum opus "The Thief and the Cobbler". "Kay introduced us to "The Thief of Baghdad" with its flying carpets, magical horses and wicked viziers". At the age of five, Kay took her son to see "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), a film which made a "tremendous impression" on him. Later he would quote his mother as saying to him "“You saw ‘Snow White’ when you were 5, and you were never the same.”