Hi everyone!
We received Walt Disney Animation Studios Walt Disney’s Nine More Old Men: The Flipbooks to review. This set of flip books came out in October. I had purchased the original Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men: The Flipbooks
a few years ago, so I knew what to expect. Nine flip books are inside the box, which makes a really nice gift set for anyone interested in traditional hand drawn Disney animation. Ub Iwerks, Norm Ferguson, Billl Tytla, Ham Luske, Art Babbitt, Grim Gatwick, Freddie Moore, Hal King, and John Sibley are the animators featured, one per book.
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There is a small booklet by Pete Docter that showcases the Nine More Old Men. It begins by saying that there was a downside to Walt Disney naming Nine Old Men in that other animators then went more unrecognized. Four of the nine in this book were easy to choose, in that they influenced animation in a way that many others didn’t. Those are Norm Ferguson, Ham Luske, Freddie Moore and Bill Tytla. Animator Ollie Johnston called them the “four gods”. The small booklet features biographies of each of the animators. And even though the pages are small, there are quite a lot of interesting anecdotes about the animators between the pages.
The books themselves are nicely presented within the box, each includes the name of one of the nine animators. There is an animator photo on one side and the character being flipped through on the other. The Ub Iwerks book features Mickey. Freddie Moore has a different Mickey “scene” and Art Babbit’s book includes Goofy. The sketches were meant to be guides for tracing onto cels, and not for individual viewing. As they are flipped, the sketches come to life.
Many of the notes from the sketches have been removed for cleaner viewing. There still are some of the notes left. Seeing each drawing in a set like this makes me appreciate the work that goes into hand drawn animation, each a small work of art.
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