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Dig A Hole: Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s Nine Old Men

April 15th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Ollie Johnston

And then there were none. Ollie Johnston, the last of Walt Disney’s exalted Nine Old Men has died at the age of 95.

The term, a variation on Franklin Roosevelt’s invective for the nine ultra conservative justices of the Supreme Court, referred to an elite core of animators who collaborated on every feature length Disney classic from Snow White through The Rescuers. Disney’s inner circle consisted of Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

In their gargantuan squash-and-stretch Bible Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life Thomas and Johnston commented on their noble personage: “We never thought of ourselves as some elite group, and the only time it ever crossed our minds was when Walt made a kidding remark about his Nine Old Men being over the hill, or getting too decrepit to work, or losing all their old zip.”

“While no two of us were alike,” they continue, “we still had many traits in common. Foremost among these was the desire to put the finest possible entertainment on the screen…For twenty-five years this remarkable team worked together, dedicated to Walt and the medium and its constant improvement.”

Ollie Johnston was born in Palo Alto, California and later attended Stanford University where he worked on campus humor magazine the Stanford Chaparral. It was here Johnston met his future animation partner and fellow “Old Man,” Frank Thomas. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, and Chouinard Art Institute he accepted a position at Walt Disney Productions where he worked from January 21, 1935 to his retirement on January 31, 1978.

Ollie found romance in the Ink and Paint department and in 1943 married a fellow Disney artist Marie Worthey. Marie Johnston died May 20, 2005.

Around the time of Peter Pan (1951), Uncle Walt was already setting his sights on television in addition to a new type of amusement park he’d been dreaming up. Frank Thomas remembered, “We knew the moment Walt climbed onto a camera boom, we’d lost him.” While Walt still attended storyboard sessions, it dawned on the Nine Old Men and director Norman Ferguson the could no longer have the boss’s undivided attention. “Maybe there was less involvement (by Disney) with Peter Pan, but he was the motivation for the picture, so that didn’t matter much.”

According to Wikipedia, “Ollie’s lifelong hobby was live steam trains. Starting in 1949, he built a 1″ scale backyard railroad, with three 1/12th scale locomotives, now owned by his sons. This railroad was one of the inspirations for Walt Disney to build his own backyard railroad, the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, which again inspired the building of the railroad in Disneyland. In the 1960s Ollie acquired and restored a full-size narrow-gauge Porter steam locomotive, which he named the ‘Marie E.’ In 2005 it ran during a private night event on the Disneyland Railroad. This engine was sold to John Lasseter (of Pixar Studios fame). The engine is fully operational and ran recently at the Santa Margarita Ranch in May of 2007.”

On November 10, 2005, Ollie Johnston was among the recipients of the prestigious National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush in an Oval Office ceremony.

Animation historian John Canemaker referred to the team as “actors with a pencil.” By giving his staff members a way to animate all the characters in his scene, Disney offered even more control to his artists. In 1995 the studio released Frank and Ollie, an intimate, and profoundly affectionate documentary about how “their friendship changed the face of animation.” It’s as entertaining a story as any Johnston ever animated and next to watching one of the classics, there isn’t a better way to remember the man.

 

 

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Filed Under Obituaries