Ollie Johnston

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Ollie Johnston (1989)
Ollie Johnston with George W. and Laura Bush (2005)

Ollie Johnston (actually Oliver Martin Johnston, Jr .; born October 31, 1912 in Palo Alto , California , † April 14, 2008 in Sequim , Washington State ) was an American animator . He was the last surviving member of Disney's Nine Old Men , a group of subscribers that the artistic style of the mid-1930s, Disney - Cartoons have shaped and -Langfilme.

biography

Johnston's father was a professor of Romance languages at Stanford University , where Ollie first attended Grammar School and later returned to art school. In 1931 he met Frank Thomas in Stanford , with whom he worked on drawings for the campus newspaper. A close friendship began that would last for more than 70 years. Johnston and Thomas both graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles , where they were tutored by the well-known illustrator Pruett Carter.

After graduating, Johnston originally wanted to become a draftsman for magazines, but he was persuaded by Frank Thomas to start working as an animator at Walt Disney Studios . Johnston began his apprenticeship at Disney on January 21, 1935 and worked as an inbetweener in films such as the Oscar- winning Silly Symphonies cartoon The Tortoise and the Rabbit . He became an assistant to Fred Moore , with whom he also worked on Disney's first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Moore was responsible for designing the dwarves, overseeing not only Johnston's work, but also that of Frank Thomas, who had since risen to become a character animator . In 1942, Johnston and Thomas were jointly responsible as supervising animators for the design of the young Bambi in the film of the same name . Four years later, Johnston was the chief draftsman for the animated sequences of Uncle Remus' Wonderland .

Until his retirement in 1978, Ollie Johnston was involved in all of the Disney animation studio's feature films. He often worked with Frank Thomas, the team was known among Disney employees as "Frank and Ollie" and was jokingly counted by Walt Disney among the studio's Nine Old Men . Johnston was a specialist in emotional scenes, his best-known characters include Alice in Alice in Wonderland , Lady in Lady and the Tramp , the three good fairies in Sleeping Beauty (1959) , Balu the Bear in The Jungle Book (1967) and the main characters in Bernard and Bianca - The Mouse Police . Frank and Ollie's last film was Cap and Capper , and they retired in 1978.

Ollie Johnston on his Garden Railway (1993)

Even after their careers at Disney ended, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas continued to work on joint projects. Together they wrote the book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation , published in 1981 , which is now considered the standard work on the techniques of classic animated film. Other book publications followed, including contributions to the Sketchbook Series about the making of individual Disney films.

In 1980 Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston received the Winsor McCay Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Annie Awards ceremony of the Asifa International Association of Animated Filmmakers . In 1989, the Walt Disney Company honored the Nine Old Men with the honorary title Disney Legends . In 2005, one year after Frank's death, Ollie Johnston received the National Medal of Arts from then US President George W. Bush .

Frank and Ollie have also been honored by other filmmakers. In Bernard and Bianca - The Mouse Police , Johnston's last film as chief draftsman, the cat Rufus was designed after Johnston. The villain of the Mickey Mouse cartoon Mickey Monster Maus (Runaway Brain) from 1995 was called “Dr. Frankenollie ". In the same year Frank's son Theodore Thomas published the documentary Frank and Ollie . Director Brad Bird gave Johnston and Thomas guest roles in the cartoon The Giant from Outer Space in 1999 and eventually had both appear as herself in the computer animation film The Incredibles . There they philosophize at the end of the film about the "old school" ( No school like the old school ), which means classically drawn cartoons.

Ollie Johnston was married to Marie Worthey, who also worked as an illustrator at Disney, from 1943 until her death in 2005. Johnston was known as a collector of model trains, his passion inspired Walt Disney to build a railroad as an attraction in Disneyland .

Johnston died as the last of the Nine Old Men in a nursing home on April 14, 2008 of old age.

Filmography (selection)

Short films

Feature films

Works (with Frank Thomas)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Disney's Illusion of Life tops best animation books poll. (No longer available online.) In: Animation World Network. September 28, 1999, archived from the original on September 3, 2009 ; accessed on April 14, 2018 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / news.awn.com
  2. ↑ Michael Broggie: Walt Disney's Railroad Story: The Small-Scale Fascination That Led to a Full-Scale Kingdom. Donning Company Publishers, Virginia Beach 1997, ISBN 1-56342-009-0 .
personal data
SURNAME Johnston, Ollie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oliver Martin Johnston, Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American animator
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Palo Alto
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 2008
Place of death Sequim