Originally Posted By iDisney72 I was watching The Incredibles the other day, and towards the end they show two older men talking, very briefly. I remember they are modeled after two legends, just can't remember who. Help, please!
Originally Posted By BlueOhanaTerror Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two mentors to Brad Bird. Frank and Ollie voiced the characters. They are known as two of the famous "Nine Old Men" that formed the core of Disney Feature Animation in its first golden age.
Originally Posted By mapleservo They have a website... <a href="http://www.frankandollie.com/FrankanOllie.html" target="_blank">http://www.frankandollie.com/F rankanOllie.html</a> (Frank sadly passed away not long after the voices were recorded for Incredibles.) I think there's a dedication at the end of the film, if I remember correctly.
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs They play engineers of a train... I believe the Iron Giant eats the track or something to that effect. Question: Why is it always about Frank and Ollie? Why not Milt and Ward (har-har) or Marc and Woolie? Why weren't the surviving 9OM featured in Iron Giant? And why haven't finished Canemaker's book on the 9OM?
Originally Posted By DlandDug >>Why is it always about Frank and Ollie?<< Because Frank and Ollie were life long friends who not only worked together, they mentored a generation of new animators and wrote several well received books. None of the other of the "nine old men" formed such a close bond.
Originally Posted By basil fan Also, they were living at the time, and could furnish the voices. I don't think Woolie or Milt were alive. Marc Davis may've been at the time, and Ward Kimball was (he always kind of looks like an animated character to me, anyway). Tarzan's Dictionary <a href="http://www.whatsitsgalore.com/etc/tarmangani.html" target="_blank">http://www.whatsitsgalore.com/ etc/tarmangani.html</a>
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs I believe Marc, Frank, Ollie and Ward were the only ones alive when The Iron Giant was made/released. Man, I should really get back to reading that book. I had just started the chapter on Les Clark.
Originally Posted By BlueOhanaTerror >>Why is it always about Frank and Ollie?<< Frank and Ollie were actually personal mentors to Brad.
Originally Posted By CuriosWolfSo >>Man, I should really get back to reading that book. I had just started the chapter on Les Clark.<< What??? You had that book for a few years and you're still reading it, 5BR? Don't tell me that you didn't read about John Lounsbery, the man who was the main animator of the Wolf from "Peter and the Wolf".
Originally Posted By actingforanimators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's presence in contemporary animation is driven largely by two things: presence and publication. Here is how they came to be so influential: In the 1970's, under the direction of Card Walker and Ron Miller, Disney began to recruit young animators to fill their dwindling ranks. This recruitment effort was lead primarily by then head of production, Don Duckwall (no kidding) and supervising veteran animator Eric Larson. Among those recruited early on was Don Bluth, an animator who had worked briefly at Disney when just out of high school on Sleeping Beauty. Bluth was groomed along with a handful of others, including John Pomeroy, to be the successors to the Disney animation veterans that then included Larson, Thomas, Johnston, Kimball, Kahl, Lounsberry, Clark & Reitherman (Davis was long gone from animation and was principally at work at WED i.e. Imagineering.) Recruited during this same time were the first graduating classes of CalArts - the former Chouinard Art School funded by the estate of Walt Disney, located in Valencia, CA. Among those graduates was Brad Bird - class of 1976 - who had actually gone to CalArts on Disney's dime. When Bird arrived at Disney's the training program was, like the division, rather informal and very political. The "Nine Old Men" were even divided into a pecking order, at the top of which sat Kahl, Kimball, Johnston and Thomas. Kimball at this stage was almost retired, working principally working on the "Mouse Factory" TV program. Kahl was so irascible and angry that he was working almost entirely by himself, and really was not into mentoring anyone. Clark and Lounsberry and Larson were enormously interested in the new recruits, but were in a "B" unit of sorts rather like sitting at the slightly less than cool lunch table in high school, frankly. It was Frank and Ollie who held sway over the shop under Reitherman's pseudo-Walt positioning as the principal producer director of animated features, and therefore, Frank and Ollie's presence was felt more keenly than any of the other animators at the studio. They shepherded more talent, mentored more careers, and had more hands-on time with the younger animators than almost anyone else had. Bluth, in the interim, was another camp unto himself, and in 1978 began taking on a self-appointed leadership role, and instituted a sort of coup in 1979, when he, Pomerory, and more than half of the new recruits made a hasty exit to form their own production company. Frank and Ollie felt betrayed (Ollie to this day can not speak or even hear Don Bluth's name without raising his blood pressure to near catastrophic levels)and retirement was postponed for Thomas, Johnston and Larson when this took place - otherwise all animated production would have ground to a halt (Lounsberry had died tragically in '76 and Clark was very ill, and died in late '79) A few stalwart recruits remained faithful to the old guys - Brad Bird and a young Glen Keane among them - believing in what they had learned at Disney, and that Bluth was full of...well, hot air and some other things. Larson, in the mean time, worked to start recruiting efforts all over again - and thus were the great second generation of animators recruited to Disney. When Frank and Ollie retired after production on "The Fox & the Hound", it was they who took the initiative to write about the craft of personality or "character" animation, particularly the approach taken at Disney's. Although the late Les Clark originally undertook this, Clark's book was incomplete at the time of his death and no formal publisher had been found. Thomas and Johnston, working in part from a draft of Clark's book (something even to this day is seldom if ever acknowledged) took the project in hand and wrote their own version titled "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life". It became the "bible" of character animation, and in fact is still considered the best book on the fine art of animation acting and technique. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, life long friends since their days at Stanford, neighbors who lived less than 50 yards from each other's back doors, and who worked hand in hand together on some of the most important animation of the Golden Age and in the transitional post-Walt era, became icons for an entire generation. They were the father figures to many, the wise keepers of a kind of animated grail - the skill, craft, artistry and genius of which countless animators aspired to drink from and whose secrets they hoped to learn. They also became a kind of cottage industry - Frank 'n Ollie - writing three more books on the craft and touring the world in the process. Frank Thomas passed away in September of 2004 just three days after his 93rd birthday. Ollie Johnston is approaching his 94th birthday.
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs <<CuriosWolfSo: What??? You had that book for a few years and you're still reading it, 5BR? Don't tell me that you didn't read about John Lounsbery, the man who was the main animator of the Wolf from "Peter and the Wolf".>> Not really... I started reading it, and then put it down for a bit.
Originally Posted By CuriosWolfSo Oooh....5BR..... *shakes my head with my paw on the forehead* Very interesting story, actingforanimators, about Frank & Ollie. I like their "THE DISNEY VILLAIN" book because it was one of the very few Disney books that mentioned and shows The Wolf from "Peter and the Wolf". (John Canemaker's "Walt Disney's Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation" is another book that also had the same specified Wolf too).
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs I second the Wolf's comments... when I was at that animation gallery store in Waikiki, I noticed that Grant's "Encyclopedia of Animated Characters" was there (albeit an older edition, judging from the book jacket's spine). Speaking of which, there's a JR. version of the book on Amazon.com <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/078683434X/ref=pd_sim_b_2/102-7351863-2784932" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ ct/078683434X/ref=pd_sim_b_2/102-7351863-2784932</a>?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
Originally Posted By CuriosWolfSo Whoops! Thanks for reminding that book "Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters" by John Grant, 5BR, for it's another book that also mentions that Wolf as well as the other Disney wolves, good and bad both. I hope John Grant will updated that book yet again since it's been many years after the last updated edition. Another book that really need an updating is Leonard Maltin's "The Disney Films" since his 4th edition in 2000.
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs I've been told that some of the reasons why those wonderful books aren't re-released are 1.) The publishers don't want to do them and 2.) The company feels that they won't profit. Of course, I never said that these were set in stone, but given the way the company is run now, that could be the case. And for the umpteenth time, here's my fantasy Villain book: Take F&O's original book, and add in the character profiles from Grant, and then any trivia from Canemaker and Dave Smith. The book would be the size of the Encyclopedia of Animated Characters... sigh... What other books do I need to finish that have been in limbo for years? Ah yes, Great Gatsy, Interview w/the Vampire/Vampire Lestat and Fellowship of the Ring...
Originally Posted By CuriosWolfSo >>I've been told that some of the reasons why those wonderful books aren't re-released are 1.) The publishers don't want to do them and 2.) The company feels that they won't profit.<< Aw, phooey! Just put in a couple of swell pictures and the original animation drawings of the Wolf and I will definitively buy the book!!! >>And for the umpteenth time, here's my fantasy Villain book: Take F&O's original book, and add in the character profiles from Grant, and then any trivia from Canemaker and Dave Smith. The book would be the size of the Encyclopedia of Animated Characters... sigh...<< Just put lots of pictures, original animation drawings, character profiles, and trivia of the Wolf & I will buy that from you for sure, 5BR! >>What other books do I need to finish that have been in limbo for years? Ah yes, Great Gatsy, Interview w/the Vampire/Vampire Lestat and Fellowship of the Ring...<< Read the "Lord of the Rings" AND "The Hobbit" three times already.... :O)
Originally Posted By tonyanton Thank you acting for the history. Your knowledge here is always appreciated!
Originally Posted By FiveBearRugs *whispers* Hey! It's that Ultimate Disney Fan! The one whose grin is bigger than TDG's! Wait a minute... how come tony didn't post the history???
