Jim on Film: Brushes with Greatness
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Brushes with Greatness:
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston

For many years, I knew the day would come when it would be the right time to share these, though I always dreaded it to some degree for two reasons. Most importantly, I knew it would be because it meant that these two monuments in my life�Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston�would no longer be with us, and secondly, it would expose my teenaged silliness.

It does seem odd to use the word monuments about people I neither met nor spoke to on the telephone, but in my early years of studying Disney, which began to some degree in the fifth grade, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston became for me the faces of this spectacular art form, most because of their book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, which I would lug out of the library and page through, admiring the beautiful artwork and reading some of the details.

One such detail that stuck out to me in my very ambitious youth was the section in the book in which Thomas and Johnston address the needs of storytelling in animated features. In the summer after fifth grade, I had actually already planned to produce an animated movie about two families of elk who fell victim to a wildlife relocation program and had to go on a journey to find their missing fathers (the elk who got hit by a car scene was going to be quite moving, let me tell you).

Fast forward to 1992, I was a freshman in high school, developing two different stories which I was sure were going to be hit animated movies. One was an adaptation of Tom Sawyer (which was going to include a talking cat voiced by Phil Harris and an entire cast of classic Disney voices returning to the screen), the other a self-made fairy tale about a beautiful princess named Rose. The first scene I wrote for Rose involved her overly excited father running around, slipping on something, sending baby Rose flying through the air, which was going to be a very funny comedy bit in my mind (I have no idea why, but there are crazier things I could have been contemplating as a freshman). The rest of the story involved, I kid you not, the princess falling in love with a peasant boy, and together, their having to fight the king�s advisor, who was plotting to marry the princess himself and then push the king off a cliff so he could be ruler. No, this wasn�t plagiarism; it was some four months before Aladdin hit theatres.

In my excitement over my ambitions, I dug up Ollie Johnston�s address in a phone book from the library (confirming that it was the correct Ollie Johnston�s address because the street number was very close to a listing for Frank Thomas�s address) and wrote him a letter.

In it, I asked him about the likelihood of the studio taking a story from me, plus a few other questions, certainly ones that were typical of what a kid my age would ask. He was, however, such a big figure in my eyes, I actually asked him if people recognized him on the street. Also, this was 1992, and it wouldn�t be until I was in college that I would get to see The Black Cauldron, and I remember asking him about what Walt Disney would have thought about it, no doubt from my childhood fascination with the darkness of its subject matter (mainly snatches of skeletal images from my memory of the commercials as well as the dark pictures from various Disney animation books).

It was with great excitement when I received the following letter in the mail:

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