Ollie Johnston, 95, Veteran Disney Animator

Ollie Johnston, who died Monday at 95, was the last of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” the master animators responsible for “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” and other classic cartoon features.A California native who went to work for Disney in the mid-1930s as an assistant, Johnston was the supervising animator for Thumper in “Bambi” (1942) and designed Pinocchio’s expanding nose. He worked on nearly every animated Disney film between 1935 and 1976, when he retired after directing “The Rescuers.” Together with fellow Disney animator Frank Thomas, he wrote several books about the studio, including “The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation” (1981), considered by many to be an animator’s bible.Johnston and Thomas had a lifelong friendship predating their work at Disney, having met in 1931 as freshman art students at Stanford University, where Johnston’s father was a professor of romance languages. They left Stanford in 1934 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Thomas went to work for Disney that year, and Johnston followed in 1935 at a weekly salary of $17. Johnston’s first assignment was to work as an “in-betweener,” responsible for drawing the action in between drawings produced by more senior artists, for the short “Mickey’s Garden” (1935). He was still an assistant when he worked on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1937), but by the time “Pinocchio” appeared in 1940, he was a full-fledged credited animator. Other well-known sequences credited to him are the “Dance of the Centaurettes” in “Fantasia” (1940), the ice skating scene in “Bambi,” and the musical high jinks of Mowgli and Baloo singing “The Bear Necessities” in “The Jungle Book” (1967).His friendship with Thomas continued, and the two men built homes on adjacent lots and raised families in Los Angeles’s Flintridge neighborhood. They carpooled to work and had adjacent studio drawing tables. “Frank and Ollie” became a byword for adding human emotion to Disney cartoons. Johnston promulgated a series of rules that were later transcribed by John Lasseter, now chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. Among the highlights:• Squash and stretch entire body for attitudes.• Don’t move anything unless it’s for a purpose.• It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting. Example: A man walks up to a mailbox, drops in his letter and walks away. OR: A man desperately in love with a girl far away carefully mails a letter in which he has poured his heart out.An infatuation with railroad trains was shared by many at the studio — including Walt Disney himself — and Johnston built a famous scale model train in his back yard. In a 1984 interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he recalled once having an accident with Walt Disney’s train.“I took a ride on it one day, sitting in the front of the train, when I must have gone too fast around a corner and kabunk! The train went sailing off the track and landed in the garden. Disney came running up. He didn’t seem at all interested in whether I was hurt, and mumbled something about demerit points if the train was ruined. He took the train for a run and said that it was okay, although it was limping a little. I don’t think he ever forgot what I’d done — although he did let me stick around and keep working.”Disney named his lead animators “Nine Old Men” after an exasperated President Roosevelt’s description of the Supreme Court. Johnston and Thomas inspired new generations of Disney animators, who paid tribute to them in later films. The character “Dr. Frankenollie” appeared in the 1995 Mickey Mouse short “Runaway Brain” (1995). The two also had cameos in “The Iron Giant” (1999) and “The Incredibles” (2004). Their creative friendship was the subject of a 1995 documentary titled, inevitably, “Frank and Ollie.” Thomas died in 2004. In the documentary, Johnston described his declining health in an animator’s lexicon:“I decided I might need to take some precautions after I noticed my pulse running down in the low 40s. I got really concerned when it stopped for 2 1/2 seconds. That got me. That’s a long time when you’re an animator: 60 frames of film.”Johnston was awarded the National Medal of Arts in a White House ceremony in 2005. His wife of 63 years, Marie, died in 2005. The next year he moved to Sequim, Wash., to be closer to his son, Ken, who survives him.

Ollie Johnston, 95, Veteran Disney Animator

Ollie Johnston, 95, Veteran Disney Animator

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