DVD Review: Frank and Ollie
Theodore Thomas' Documentary About Disney Animators' Friendship
Oct 17, 2007
Imagine two friends who met while they were at Stanford University. They moved together down to California during the Great Depression, got jobs at the same company, even moved into neighboring houses, and stayed friends for over sixty years.
Now realize that these men were Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt Disney's legendary "Nine Old Men," who literally wrote the book on 20th Century animation.
This is the story of Frank and Ollie.
Frank and Ollie's Life in Cartoons
Theodore Thomas' 1995 documentary examines these two animation geniuses who literally lived together all their lives, while creating sequences for such films as 1937's Snow White all the way to 1977's The Rescuers. Frank and Ollie specialized in character animation, giving heart and pathos to mere lines on a page.
Even though they had the same specialty, and worked closely together, their drawing styles were very different. Ollie's cartoons spoke volumes with the minimal amount of strokes, while Thomas' characters were chaos on a single page, but flowed into poetry when the pages were flipped. But both men were brilliant at getting into the heart and soul of their characters.
"Frank and Ollie are two of the greatest animators ever," says animation historian John Canemaker during the movie, "because they are two of the greatest screen actors, ever."
Canemaker develops Chuck Jones' classic line that Frank Thomas was the "Lawrence Olivier of animation" by insisting that Thomas had more range than the master thespian: "Olivier never played a doorknob."
Director Theodore Thomas (Frank's younger son) illustrates this assertion this by getting the two animators to act classic sequences from Alice in Wonderland and The Rescuers in front of a photographer's canvas. This staging shows how much of the action in these classic movies came from Frank and Ollie's acting abilities.
The Stories Behind the Classics
The movie drags in places, especially when it gets into Frank and Ollie puttering around their properties, moving plants, playing the piano and messing around with trains, but the real treat is the story behind some of those Disney movies.
For instance, Frank Thomas animated the frozen pond sequence – possibly the funniest bit in Bambi – in a mere three days because he had to convince writers not to cut the sequence entirely. And then there was Ollie Johnston's reaction to Walt Disney's brainwave that a little girl seduce Mowgli into the man village in the final minutes of The Jungle Book.
"I originally thought it was a terrible idea," recalls Ollie Johnston.
"I know," replies Frank Thomas. "That's why we gave it to you to animate."
In fact, Frank and Ollie animated over half of The Jungle Book, which demonstrated that Disney Animation could survive and flourish after Walt's death. The movie thankfully passes on the bitter Animators' Strike of 1941, and the post-Rescuers fall of Disney Animation until 1989's The Little Mermaid.
However, in showing how important Frank and Ollie were to Disney Animation, the movie never mentions one of Frank and Ollie's biggest contributions to 21st Century animation: the 1981 reference The Illusion of Life, which occupies an honoured place in virtually every professional animator's bookshelf.
Despite these minor flaws, Frank and Ollie is a look at two fascinating lives, and takes the viewer behind the process of some of the greatest films of the last century. A solid 8/10
The extras in this DVD are mainly for animation professionals and fanatics only, but Glen Keane's reminiscences of working with Ollie are well worth viewing.
Extra Tidbit: Frank and Ollie voiced a cameo/tribute in Brad Bird's 2004 movie, The Incredibles. After the climactic battle scene, they were the two old men saying, "That's old school." "Yeah, no school like the old school."
Frank Thomas died in September 8, 2004, leaving Ollie Johnston the sole surviving member of the "Nine Old Men."
(thanks to Bear for loaning me the DVD)
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