Thomas’ work on films such as Bambi has inspired animators and fans for generations. All sketches and movie images courtesy of Walt Disney Enterprises.

We got to meet Frank Thomas. Every year he would come up and give us lectures and inspire us. At the end of every year we would show the work to everybody and he was there and he was so excited about what we were doing. All The Nine Old Men were so excited about this program and all the young people and talent.

Frank Thomas retired the year before I got to work at Disney, but he was there with Ollie of course making, writing, preparing and researching their book, The Illusion of Life. When I got to the Disney studios it was a little different than my dreams had. All of us at CalArts were just so empowered with wanting to do great films. I mean Star Wars had just come out. We wanted to do that in animation. But we get there and it was not quite what we had dreamed of. At times, we were told just to keep our ideas to ourselves and do what we were told. It was like my heart was ripped out. This was not what I always dreamed Disney was.

But I found myself going into Frank and Ollie’s office and they always welcomed me. They loved the passion that we had. We were just on fire and they loved it. They loved this medium so much that they wanted to share what they had learned though the years with everybody. They sat and talked with me. I remember they would be Xeroxing things that summer I was and I would stand there at the Xerox machine and talk to them about animation. They were so filled with passion. The one thing I so loved about Frank Thomas was his incredible sense of curiosity. He just loved to try things. 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. I would take scenes to him and he’d do thumbnails and look at it different ways and explore all possibilities.

So many of the comments I was getting from the directors at the time were to just do it this way because that’s how Walt would have wanted it. But what I realized was what Frank was talking about was how Walt would have wanted it. To stretch the boundaries of this medium.

When I was at Disney, I started seeing the first bits of 3D animation being done my computers and I got so excited about it. I talked to Frank about it and he was so excited too about this notion, 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.”

So I got to work with Keane on this 30-second test where we combined 3D computer animation with this amazing animation that Glen did. It was called Wild Things Test. And when we finished it, at the time, people looked at it and said, “This is too expensive.” Computers can’t make animation cheaper or faster. I was so disappointed. I followed my dream, though, and Frank was with me in spirit, and I went to Lucasfilm and worked with Ed Catmull and our group named Pixar. I always stayed in contact with Frank and showed him what we were doing and he was such a tremendous support.

We made Toy Story and they came to the first screening of it and they were so proud. Prior to that in 1987, we spoke on the same panel at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim. We had been making these computer animation shorts. One of my favorite stories was after I did the first computer animation with characters it was shown at SIGGRAPH in 1984. This guy came up who was working for another computer animation company came up and said, “What you did is so amazing. What software did you use?” And I said, “It’s just a keyframe animation system similar to what other people had developed.” He said, “No, no, it’s so funny. What software did you use?”

And I thought to myself, “Here’s an entire art form growing out of this science and they’re starting to make animation and none of them understand what I’ve learned from Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and The Nine Old Men of the principles of animation. This is the foundation of moving things that…Frank always talked to me about — it’s not just moving something. It’s not just the follow through. It’s not just the amazing lines. It’s what the character is thinking. It’s the heart. What is the character saying? What is it communicating to the audience? “He always told me that every movement of an animated character needed to be motivated by its own thought process. The character should be thinking. I never forgot that. And I realized at that moment standing there at SIGGRAPH — no one knows about this.

So I actually wrote a paper — I mean I went to CalArts. I can’t spell, this was before spell check on the computer. But I wrote a technical paper called “The Principles of Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation.” And, of course, 90% of it was gigantic direct quotes straight out of The Illusion of Life, but you know what, no one could say it better than them.