Watch Walt Disney talk about the making of Bambi

Watch the making of Pinocchio in 1940

The work of Ollie Johnston is burnt into the subconscious of generations of children. As one of the main Disney animators, known collectively as the “nine old men”, Johnston breathed life into films from Sleeping Beauty onwards; he made Pinocchio’s nose grow when he lied to the Blue Fairy, drew the adventures and terrors of the young Bambi and created the exuberant dance of Baloo and Mowgli as they sing The Bare Necessities.

Johnston brought real emotion to Disney’s cartoons, helping to show that animation could convey more than just gags and become an art form in its own right — he called his craft “acting with a pencil”. With Frank Thomas, his fellow animator and best friend for 70 years, Johnston fashioned the distinctively adorable Disney style of which Bambi was the wide-eyed exemplar. He was the last of the “nine old men” to die.

Johnston was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1912. His father was Professor of Romance Languages at Stanford University. After attending the local high school, Johnston enrolled at Stanford to study art. In the university art department he met Frank Thomas, who was to be his best friend, closest collaborator — and for many years his neighbour — until Thomas died in 2004 (obituary, Sept 13, 2004).

The pair drew for the campus magazine and when Thomas moved to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1934, Johnston left Stanford early to join him. He initially hoped to work in magazines, but the shorts that Disney was making woke him up to the potential of animation. Thomas joined the company in 1934 with Johnston following early the next year.

He worked initially as an “in- betweener”, filling in between the main action scenes, at $17 a week. But he soon impressed Walt Disney, the company’s driving force, and he became an assistant to Fred Moore, head animator on Snow White (1937), Disney’s first feature-length animation.

This project, dubbed “Disney’s folly”, was widely expected to destroy the company but it proved a triumphant success. Johnston became part of the core team of young animators who created the classic Disney features — Walt Disney nicknamed them the “nine old men” after President Roosevelt’s slighting reference to the justices of the Supreme Court.

Johnston drew key scenes on Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940) before he and Thomas were appointed supervising animators on Bambi (1942). The pair based their drawings on meticulous preparation, spending hours at the zoo and watching wildlife films. “We had a guy who was a real authority on animal anatomy,” Johnston said in 1997. “Walt hired him to come teach us all about the anatomy of deer muscles.” In addition, they studied child psychology, seeking to create a character that looked animal but felt human; “believable rather than realistic”, as Johnston put it.

Although the film initially struggled commercially, the pathos of a young fawn alone in the forest passed into modern folklore. “One thing Walt realised quite early was that man killing Bambi’s mother would be the most powerful and memorable statement ever made in an animated film,” Johnston and Thomas later wrote. “No longer philosophical or an important lesson about survival, it spoke directly to the heart.”

Johnston’s drawing brought such moments alive, by making the emotion of the characters instantly apparent. “First thing you try to do is communicate what your character is feeling, what they’re thinking,” he said in 2005. “You still have to do it in the most entertaining way.” He tried to inhabit the characters by acting out the movements himself. “If you shrug your shoulders, you feel how they work, if you squint your eyes and open them wide you can feel how it stretches your face,” he said.

This “intuitive” approach, as he called it, could be frustrating. “You’d spend all day killing yourself, trying to get the right personality to your drawings, so that the characters would mean something to the audiences,” he later said. “I remember it took me weeks to get the stepsisters in Cinderella right. You’d come home with a sore neck and shoulder from bending down and drawing, and you’d wonder if you’d lost your touch.” And then there was the long tedious slog of creating the thousands of drawings necessary for a film-length animation. “I was working so hard I didn’t know what was going on.”

Johnston drew the talking doorknob in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Mr Smee in Peter Pan (1953), Pongo and Perdita, father and mother of the 101 Dalmatians (1961), the waiter-penguins in Mary Poppins (1964) and Mowgli and Baloo in The Jungle Book (1967).

Disney died during production of the latter film. Unlike others of the nine old men, who had well-publicised fallings-out with Disney, both Johnston and Thomas seemed happy to submit to his direction and watch most of the credit, and money, accrue to him. “Walt did most of our publicity and I felt it would have been bad to have our names as important as Walt’s,” Johnston said.

They made several more films for Disney, including the Aristocats (1970), The Rescuers (1977) — which they considered “our best film on our own” — and Winnie the Pooh (1977), a collection of shorts. They retired in 1978 and co-wrote a book, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (1981), that laid out the foundations of their art with what The New York Times called “remarkable clarity and directness”. It has become a standard and influential guide, widely known as the “animator’s bible”.

Three more books followed, on Bambi (1990), sight gags (1987) and Disney villains (1993). In 1995 Thomas’s son Theodore produced a film, Frank and Ollie, in which the pair reminisce contentedly about their career. They had cameo roles in Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004). In 2005 Johnston was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bush.

Outside the studio, Johnston was a railway enthusiast, and kept a 1901 locomotive and half a mile of track at his California holiday home.

Of his characters Johnston wrote: “They are real people to me — what they do comes from inside them and inside me. This is the part that makes animation like no other medium. It is difficult to explain the thrill I get out of seeing my drawings move through the changes of expressions and attitudes, in a way that gives them that mystical quality of life.”

His wife Marie, whom he married in 1943, died in 2005. He is survived by their two sons.

Ollie Johnston, animator, was born on October 31, 1912. He died on April 14, 2008, aged 95