Woolie

Wolfgang Reitherman, Disney animator, director, producer, and head of Feature Animation from the middle 1960s to the tail end of the 1970s, has his 110th birthday today.

Mr. Reitherman began his career at the Disney studios in 1933, departed for military service during World War II, then returned -- after a stretch as an airline pilot -- in the second half of the 1940s. Said Ward Kimball:

Woolie was a good animator, but I think he suffered from a little inferiority complex. He didn't think he was a good artist, even though he was. Basically I think underneath, he compared himself to Fred oore or some of the others, which made him work harder.

But yet, because of this extra drive Woolie had, it reminds me of Pete Rose, the drive Pete had playing baseball. The guy, who is probably older than the others, but he's a student and wants to be better and consequently he is. Woolie's stuff in "The Rite Of Spring" in "Fantasia" has a great monumental weight to it, because Woolie in his own way just kept after it.

Woolie was tenacious. He didn't have the quick facility or facile way of working as Fred Moore had, or the flamboyant, spontaneous timing of Norm Ferguson. And he had to work harder, but he ended up with good stuff. He did good stuff on Jiminy Cricket, for instance. The cricket jumping along pointing to the words of the Blue Fairy's letter with his can, that's Woolie.

And of course, "How To Ride A Horse" [the Goofy short from '41] is one of the funniest shorts. Woolie was the Goof man after features he worked on. ... He was always stuck with the chase stuff because most people hated to do that, but Woolie got a big kick out of doing fast action and wild-out stuff, and he did it well....

After awhile, Wolfgang R. became known as the Disney "action specialist". When an inventive chase or fight or epic battle was needed, Woolie invariably got the assignment. He directed the climax to "Sleeping Beauty" which is pretty much nonstop action. ("We were trying to kill that damn prince," he said.)

Woolie began directing animated features in the 1950s, and ran the Disney animation department after Walt's death. He'd been a C.O. during World War II, and had a natural "gravitas". He was tireless in story sessions, tenacious when going over an animator's sequence at the movieola, always pushing to get the most out of a scene.

Wolfgang Reitherman retired from Walt Disney Productions in 1981 and died in a car accident in 1985, hale and robust to the end.