Animation is a very flexible art. It can be done with bottle caps, modelling clay, puppets, toys, a crate of sand, sausages, oysters, almost anything. Perhaps the most critically difficult animation was accomplished by the animators of Pinocchio, Snow White, Dumbo, Fantasia and similar pictures in the Disney Portfolio during the 'Golden Years' of animation. These artists were giants in the animation world.
In the fifty years since animation become an active part of cinema entertainment there have been no more than twelve or fifteen really great animators. Most of them have now retired but their work is as much loved today as it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago.
These were not superman. If you put on a pair of dark glasses and look at them through the wrong end of a dusty telescope they look very much like the rest of us. They eat pizza and hot dogs and asparagus with cheddar cheese dressing. They have headaches and hobbies like you and me and the little kid next door who collects apple stems. But they were super animators. Let's turn the telescope around and look at three of these super animators.
Milt Kahl, Mace Davis and Ollie Johnston are three who spent all of their animation years at the Walt Disney studio. They were member's of the group joshingly dubbed, by Walt Disney in one of his lighter moments, 'The Nine Old Men'. They all joined the Disney art staff near the inception of Snow White, Walt's first feature length picture. They remained until 'The Rescuers', the last of the big feature length cartoons released by the studio.
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