Who were Disney's Nine Old Men? I run down the careers of the influential animators. This installment honours Frank Thomas (September 5, 1912 - September 8, 2004).

Walt Disney's Nine Old Men were the backbone of his studio, the guys he trusted to always get things right.

Frank Thomas was the premiere character animator, not only creating classic villains like Peter Pan's Capt. Hook and Cinderella's Lady Tremaine, but also brilliant moments like the "spaghetti eating" scene in Lady and the Tramp. He was the other side of the legendary "Frank and Ollie" duo, inseparable from his lifelong friend Ollie Johnston.

Some maintain that he was the greatest actor of the 20th Century. In the 1995 documentary Frank and Ollie, animation historian John Canemaker expanded Chuck Jones' statement that Thomas was the "Lawrence Olivier of animation" by insisting that Thomas did more than the master thespian.

"Olivier never played a doorknob," Canemaker said.

Frank Thomas: Animator, Musician and Author

Franklin Thomas was born on September 5, 1912, in Fresno, California. By the age of nine, he knew that he wanted to become an artist.

After high school, Thomas attended Fresno State College, where his father was president. But it was when he attended Stanford University that he met Johnston. After graduation, Frank and Ollie moved to Los Angeles, where they both attended the Chouinard Art Institute.

Thomas heard that Disney was hiring, and joined the Mouse House on September 24, 1934, becoming employee #224. He first worked on the short "Mickey's Elephant."

He secured his future by animating three classic moments: the funeral scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the "I've Got No Strings" number in Pinocchio, and the pond skating sequence in Bambi. Thomas spent three days creating the latter, possibly the funniest moment in Bambi, so that Walt wouldn't cut it.

Thomas also created the Queen of Hearts for Alice in Wonderland, and the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty. He also animated, along with Milt Kahl, the "I Just Wanna Be Like You" sequence from The Jungle Book and the wizard's duel in The Sword in the Stone.

Thomas also animated Mickey Mouse in the shorts "The Brave Little Tailor" and "The Pointer," which Canemaker rates as some of Mickey's "most subtle and sincere performances."

Fellow animator Ward Kimball lured Thomas into playing piano with his acclaimed Dixieland band, The Firehouse Five Plus Two.

After retiring from Disney in 1978, Thomas and Johnston collaborated on the The Illusion of Life, now considered the animator's bible. They wrote four more books together: 1987's Too Funny for Words: Disney's Greatest Sight Gags, 1990's Walt Disney's Bambi: The Story and the Film, 1992's The Jungle Book Portfolio, and Thomas' favourite, 1993's The Disney Villain.

Thomas and Johnston voiced a train engineer in Brad Bird's 1999 film The Iron Giant, and a spectator in 2004's The Incredibles.

Frank Thomas died on September 8, 2004, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

John Lasseter on Frank Thomas

When Lasseter joined Disney in the mid-1970's, he found it a chilling experience. Senior animators, more concerned with maintaining the status quo than creating great art, told him, "to keep our ideas to ourselves and do what we were told."

But Thomas, retired but still doing research at the studio, was an oasis of inspiration.

"(Frank and Ollie) loved the passion that we had," Lasseter told AWN in 2004. "They loved this medium so much that they wanted to share what they had learned though the years with everybody . . . I so loved . . . his incredible sense of curiosity . . . He told me to never just do it the way you think it should be the first time. Explore it. Challenge it. Look at it all different ways."

Other people told Lasseter to "just do it this way because that’s how Walt would have wanted it. But . . . what Frank was talking about was how Walt would have wanted . . . to stretch the boundaries of this medium."

Lasseter said that Thomas was excited about CGI because "Walt always was trying to get more dimension into his animation. Look at the multiplane camera. Look at the opening shot in Bambi. He was striving for this. I looked at the computer and said, 'This was what Walt was waiting for.' And Frank goes, 'Yes.'"

However, Thomas said CGI would only match traditional cel animation, “When computer animation can create pathos."

While Ollie Johnston's mantra was "Don’t animate drawings, animate feelings," Thomas took a slightly different tack.

"Until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed," he said. "Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal."

(Thanks to AWN, the Disney website and IMDb for information on this article)