Footnote #57 - Disney's Nine Old Men
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this look at Disney authorship and the industry of animation via a turn to the celebrated Nine Old Men, a core group of directors and artists involved with the consolidated of the Disney aesthetic and a key component of its hyper-realist visual style. Listen as Chris maps some of the Nine Old Men’s key personnel and their contribution to the refinement of animation’s illusion of life credentials; questions of labour and the historical celebration of cel-animation’s best practice; the highly gendered image of technological development and occlusion of women from Disney’s production hierarchies; and the ongoing mythology that surrounds the Nine Old Men as masters of the medium.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Pallant, Chris. 2011. Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation. London: Continuum.
Holliday, Christopher and Chris Pallant. 2021. “The Depth Deception: Landscape, Technology and the Manipulation of Disney’s Multiplane Camera in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).” In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy, eds. Chris Pallant and Christopher Holliday, 61–77. London: Bloomsbury.
Thomas, Frank and Ollie Johnston. 1981. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New York: Abbeville Press.
Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.