Reviews

The Nine Old Men: Lessons, Techniques, and Inspiration from Disney's Great Animators by Andreas Deja

gslife's review against another edition

3.0

Andreas Deja's The Nine Old Men is a great look at the animation careers of Walt Disney's core group of animators. I do with Deja would go more in depth into some of the issues and resolutions he only hints at, or that he would have looked deeper into the way the men worked together. The writing is fairly bland, and the critique of their work is fairly surface-level, but it's clear these animators were at the top of their game and the best in the business. The book has reproductions of original pencils and frame-by-frame roughs of iconic characters and sequences, something you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. It's a treat for a Disney fan, and a double treat for an illustrator.

mct4444's review

5.0

A great treatise on the style and strengths of each of the Nine Old Men. Overall, I found this book to be very interesting and enjoyable. Deja's ability to take sketches by different artists and analyze them to demonstrate style and character is amazing and gives the reader much more insight than if it had been a straight forward history. I like the layout of the book although I didn't quite understand why they were presented in the order they were. My main issue is that it was clear the Deja is not a native writer, and as such much of the writing was extremely repetitive. In a book which would already be repetitive in that it had nine sections all chronicling the same period of time, it was made worse by Deja's stilted prose. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to any Disney animation fan.

honeybeatslibrary's review

5.0

As a disney nerd this was just delightful. I knew some about walt's nine old men, but to have a fellow animator explain what made their work so special was really cool and it was nice to put artist with film moment. i would 10/10 recommend this was just a pleasure to read :)