Nine Old Men Research Paper

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Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men was a group of core animators at the Walt Disney Studios. The key members include Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman and Frank Thomas. They helped creating many remarkable classic characters and stories in animation history. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs onwards to The Rescuers were some of the famous animated cartoon they had brought up to. A lot of artists today still look to their work for guidance and inspiration. Each of them has individually been honoured with a Winsor McCay Award in recognition of an animator’s lifetime achievement. In 1989, all Nine Old Men have been acknowledged as Disney Legends.

Les Clark was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1907. He attended Venice High School in Los Angeles and worked at an ice cream shop near Walt Disney Studios as a summer job. Les joined Disney since 1927. He was the first of the nine to join the …show more content…

He started his career in Disney Studios since 1933. At the very beginning, he worked as an assistant animator on the shorts The Tortoise and the Hare and Two-Gun Mickey. He was later served as an animation director. He designed Figaro the cat in Pinocchio. He also animated the horses and the centaurs for the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence in Fantasia. Larson assisted Marc Davis in creating the title character of Cinderella (1950) and animated caterpillar in Alice in the Wonderland (1951). However, the flight to Netherland in Peter Pan (1953) is his most prominent sequence. Larson was responsible to in charge of searching and training new talents after Walts’s death in 1966. Many well-known animators included Brad Bird, Tim Burton, Andreas Deja, John Lasseter and Glen Kleane, all had gone through Larson’s training programme. Larson was the last of the nine to retire after working for 52 years with Disney. He passed away two years later after retirement on October 25,

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