Producer & Director Ted Thomas

Each year at this time I’m asked by folks with Disney-addicts on their list “What should I get them? What’s the prefect gift for my Mouseaholic?�? Had the Treasures collection not seen an absurdly abrupt and still inappropriately explained delay, I might well have rattled off a list of those titles. I’m tempted to suggest John Canemaker’s brilliant and uncomplicated tribute to Mary Blair published back in October. There’s also the wonderful The Disney Treasures by Robert Tieman. But the fact remains that this year I wanted to find not a long list but some single item that I could recommend as holding such Disney delight that it was an absolute must for every holiday shopper. Something that if Santa didn’t leave it under the tree, then your Grandmother’s gift of “green�? could secure for you after Christmas. Not too costly, not too rare, something like Walt Disney himself - accessible, uncomplicated, pure and filled with creative excitement.

In a year in which the Walt Disney Company has been rocked by change it seems most appropriate to be searching for something that gives comfort and a sense of what makes Disney truly unique - not just something nostalgic but something that points to the future with hope. Since the firing of Michael Eisner is difficult to fit into a stocking (and don’t think I wouldn’t like to try) I searched for something that everyone in the vast Disney audience - park goers and film goers and television viewers alike - could warm up in front of like the glow of the true Disney fire that burns in our spiritual hearths. We could all use a little warmth as the long dark shadows creep across the studio…err..lawn.

As visions of stock-holder proxies danced in my head, I reflected on the Disney Year 2003. We saw not only Roy Disney’s brave, vocal and emotionally charged departure, but the abrupt demise during production of yet another animated feature, resulting in the very real threat of the further dismantling of the great traditions of Disney animation. More than two generations of artists are still awaiting word of what’s to become of them. For it is in them that the legacy is carried to audiences, and it is through them that the spirit has been applied in spite of all the management hurdles (hurdles stenciled with the letters MBA or ME. That’s ME as in MINE, as in ALL MINE AND NOT YOURS…M E! Hmmmm . . .curious coincidence that those are also someone’s initials.) Anyway, the point is that some sense of something better yet to come is greatly needed right now. Well, I’ve got it. It’s just what the North Pole ordered for the disillusioned, disheartened and disenfranchised in the Kingdom - the FRANK & OLLIE Special Edition DVD.

Seven years ago film maker Ted Thomas set about the task of making a film chronicling an extraordinary friendship - that between his father, Disney pioneer character animator Frank Thomas, and Frank’s long time best friend, neighbor and colleague Ollie Johnston. What resulted was FRANK & OLLIE, a documentary film which, like so many artistic endeavors, is a voyage in discovering much more than the nature of friendship and has ultimately proved to be an extraordinary sweet onion of inspiration.