The Nine Old Men of Disney

The Nickname That Stuck

Walt Disney had a particular sense of humor, dry and affectionate in equal measure. In the 1970s, when his core group of master animators were still working at the studio—men who had been with him since the experimental days of the 1930s—he started calling them "the Nine Old Men." The reference was political, a wink at Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court, which conservatives had dubbed "the nine old men" during the New Deal era. But Disney's version carried no criticism. These were his trusted veterans, the artists who had transformed his vision of animation from flickering novelty into something that could make audiences weep. The name caught on, and it stuck even after Walt's death. Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Frank Thomas—these nine animators became synonymous with the Disney style itself. They weren't the only talented artists at the studio, not by far. But they formed the creative nucleus, the group that developed, refined, and codified the principles that would govern character animation for generations. What's remarkable is that they didn't arrive at the studio as masters. Most joined Disney in the early 1930s as young men, some barely out of their teens, stepping into a medium that was still finding its vocabulary. Animation was crude then—rubbery characters bouncing through gag sequences, movement without weight or consequence. The Nine Old Men, working alongside Walt and dozens of other artists, would spend the next decade solving problems that no one had quite articulated yet. How do you make a drawing feel like it has mass? How do you convey thought before action? How do you create the illusion not just of movement, but of life? Their answers became the twelve basic principles of animation, a framework so fundamental that it's still taught in every animation school today, whether students are working with pencils or pixels.