LOS ANGELES — Ollie Johnston, the last of the “Nine Old Men” who animated “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Fantasia,” “Bambi” and other classic Walt Disney films, died Monday. He was 95.
Johnston died at a long-term-care facility in Sequim, Wash., Walt Disney Studios vice president Howard Green said Tuesday.
“Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists, one of the real pioneers of our art, one of the major participants in the blossoming of animation into the art form we know today,” Roy Disney, nephew of Walt Disney and director emeritus of the Walt Disney Co., said in a statement.
Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his “Nine Old Men,” borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s description of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although most of Disney’s men were in their 20s at the time, the name stuck with them for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. The pair, who met as art students at Stanford University in the 1930s, were hired by Disney for $17 a week at a time when he was expanding the studio to produce full-length feature films. Both worked on the first of those features, 1937’s “Snow White.”
Johnston and Thomas and their families became neighbors in the Los Angeles suburb of Flintridge, and during their drive to the Disney Studios each day, they would devise fresh ideas for work.
Johnston worked as an assistant animator on “Snow White” and became an animation supervisor on “Fantasia” and “Bambi” and an animator on “Pinocchio.” He was especially proud of his work on “Bambi” and its classic scenes, including one depicting the heartbreaking death of Bambi’s mother at the hands of a hunter. That scene has brought tears to the eyes of generations of young and old viewers.
“The mother’s death showed how convincing we could be at presenting really strong emotion,” he remarked in 1999.
