Ollie Johnston, 1912-2008 (Updated)

The New York Times' obituary of Ollie Johnston today has a helpful explanation of why a group of young animators got tagged with the collective nickname "Nine Old Men." The phrase came from F.D.R.'s characterization of the Supreme Court and was applied jokingly to the nonet of animators—then all in their 20s—at Disney's studio. Ollie Johnson in fact did live to a ripe old age—he was 95 when he passed yesterday.

He was the supervising animator on the oft-outrageous "Pastoral Symphony" segment of 1940's Fantasia, pictured above. He was also the animator in charge of the mischievous, winsome Thumper in Bambi. And of course he did quite a bit more...

Disney characters such as Thumper got a lot of lampooning from the boys of Warner's Termite Terrace. Tex Avery's Screwball Squirrel, created for MGM after Avery left the Warner's lot, began his cartoon career by braining a cute bunny. A healthy disrespect for convention is all well and good. But here's the thing. You look at Thumper, the actual Thumper, and not the dozens of cheap knockoffs of Thumper that came in his wake and now languish in the more obscure corners of cartoon history, and you get a sense of humanity that's so disarming it's uncanny. What Johnston and his fellows took the most pride in was embuing their anthropomorphized animals with palpable human emotion. Nobody did it better before, or has done it better since.

UPDATE: My dear friend Joseph Failla, a very talented artist and a far more profound student of animation than I've ever been, e-mails me some very apropos thoughts:

As an animation student myself, who had a particular reverence for the superlative Disney approach, I looked up to these fellows much the same way a confirmed baseball fan does to the hallowed members of that sport's Hall of Fame.

I was lucky enough to have met Ollie Johnston with his longtime friend and working partner Frank Thomas (who passed in 2004 at age 92) at a book signing held for their book Disney Animations: The Illusion of Life (a definitive examination of character animation by way of Disney studios) in the mid 80's. Although the meeting was brief, they were both kind, and, for the moment, lived up to everything I believed they were; two grand old men who epitomized the top of their game and craft. The event had a good turnout from enthusiastic animation fans, but I couldn't help thinking about the irony of the situation; if we weren't dealing with animation and could see these two men for the great performers they really were, we would have understood that they deserved the kind of attention accorded to actors like Olivier! That's how important their contributions have been to our lives. Even though most folks can identify the films, characters, or sequences they love so much...unfortunately, they've never heard of the men behind them. Besides the books they created together, a good way to get acquainted with the work of Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas is the documentary Frank and Ollie, which covers their career and personal lives.

Some nice tributes come from director Brad Bird, who characterized Frank and Ollie with animated cameos in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, for which the two old friends provided their own voices. So it's fitting and very comforting to know the qualities Ollie and Frank put across in each of their films is not lost on Bird, who'll continue to strive for that same excellence in his own projects.

Amen, brother. Amen.

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