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Posted by Dominic von Riedemann May 13, 2008 |
I was away on vacation when the news broke about the death of Ollie Johnston, the last remaining member of Walt Disney's Nine Old Men, on April 14th of this year.
Given that I only found out about it 8 days later, I didn't want to do just another memorial, given that many other websites had done great obituaries for the legendary animator and teacher. However, I did notice that there was a lot of information about the Nine Old Men scattered about the InterWeb, and many sources that directly contradicted each other.
For instance, Wikipedia claimed that Wolfgang Reitherman joined Disney in 1935 along with Milt Kahl, but Disney's website claimed that Reitherman joined in 1933.
Even Disney screwed up by placing the character of Madame Medusa in 1963's The Sword in the Stone, when in fact she only appeared in 1977's The Rescuers. In fact, it was the character design of Madame Min that Wolfgang Reitherman praised when he viewed Milt Kahl's work (you can click the link to read more about that story).
Given that there was so much contradictory information out there, I decided the best way was to collect everything I could find about these great animators, and put it all in one place. Obviously I could only tell each animator's story in under 800 words (due to space considerations), but I wanted to cut through the garbage and tell each animator's story in an interesting and informative way.
So I hope you enjoy this nine-part series on some of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. And if you have any comments, or stories you'd like to share, go ahead and say your piece.