A half-century ago, two young artists straight out of school joined Walt Disney's film studio just as he was planning to undertake his first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. After several years of significant contributions to the fledging art of animation, these two, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, were named supervising animators and elevated to Disney's animation board - ultimately to be numbered among the studio's legendary "Nine Old Men." Following retirement in 1978, after long careers that won them recognition as two of the world's best character animators, Thomas and Johnston began work on Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, their classic history of the development of animation during Disney's golden age (wich Abbeville published in 1981). Without such a record, they feared that priceless firsthand knowledge of the early days of this young art form would be irretrievably lost in the final passing of those few oldtimers left.
Complete as Disney Animation is, the authors began to realize that a significant part of the Disney story was yet to be explored definitively. Disney films were widely recognized as different from their competitors' - there was a distinctive approach to visual humor that indelibly characterized the studio's productions - and since Thomas and Johnston had themselves worked on all of the best-loved features and many of the memorable shorts, they were peerlessly qualified to record and analyze the development of Disney humor. Indeed, not only had the authors played important roles in actually creating this distinctive humor over the years, but, since they had been trained by several of the studio's original animators, their knowledge of Disney animation goes right back to the studio's beginnings.
Never short of anecdotes about Walt and the other early artists (or the jokes they played on each other), the authors present a charming, funny, and authorative story of just how Disney elevated animation from jumpy stick figures acting out gags to genuine works of art that move - and, furthermore, move their audiences. In this unique volume, the authors not only fully explain Disney humor as no one else could but they lavishly illustrate - with original drawings preserved in the Archives ! - the various kinds of sight gags that were used in creating the greatest body of work in world animation. This is the book that finally reveals the true key to Disney humor. |
