And when I say geniuses, I’m not talking about animation, although that was certainly part of it. These guys were geniuses at life. Their lives were rich in every respect, filled with adventure, fun, passion, family, and drenched in love. Too often, we think of geniuses as people who excel in one thing, when in fact it is life in its entirety that informs us and guides us to our greatness.

Woolie Reitherman was a ‘Hump’ pilot in World War II married to a former motorcycle stunt girl he met when she was a flight attendant and he was a pilot for Philippine Air after the war. He was a cowboy with a ranch in Montana. He was a surfer. (”To understand a wave, and the mechanics at work, before you can surf it, you have to give yourself over to the wave, let it toss you around some,” he said to me.) It was somewhat coincidental to his life that he was the best animator of Disney’s action scenes, and the guy Walt Disney chose to produce the animated features after Walt gave up the gig to focus on his theme parks in the 1950s.

Frank Thomas had these magical hands that literally danced over the keyboard when he played jazz piano. On Fridays at the Disney studio lot in Burbank, he and other musicians would open the loading door to a soundstage and play Dixieland, and for an hour or so, it was the soundtrack to our workaday lives. Keyed on Frank’s piano, that music put bounce in your step. It was the same bounce Frank could put into anything he touched. Animation paper just happened to be one of those things.

Marc Davis was an expert on primitive New Guinean art and culture. He and his wife, Alice, a talented artist in her own right, bought a second house right next to their home in Silver Lake, where Marc kept his stunning New Guinean collection. Marc was a wonderfully refined human being — he and Alice hosted Sunday afternoon salons for young artists to whom they took a shine — and yet he never lost his connection to the most primitive elements of existence, to people and tribes still rooted deeply to mysteries, magics and mythologies. Disney animation was simply a way for Marc Davis to express the extension and breadth of his stride upon the planet.

They could be shockingly ribald, these creators of the gentle Disney characters, and that was part of their secret, I think. Those gentle characters had some very human souls.

Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas competed viciously with one another to prove themselves the best at what they did. (My friend Dave Spafford once drew a caricature of Milt pissing on Frank’s drawings while saying, “Hey Frank, your drawings are looking better all the time.” From what I hear, that pretty much captured their relationship.)

Kahl, generally conceded to be the best pure artist who ever worked as a Disney animator, whose animation style single-handedly changed the art form, was a notoriously feisty individual. When I met him, he gave me a breakneck ride in his sports car then showed me around his home, updated me on several computer chess games he had going, showed me dozens of beautiful, graceful, 3-D sculptures he’d made out of wire. In the master bedroom I noted the beautifully-drawn Japanese erotic art hangng over the bed. “It’s my hobby,” he told me.

“Japanese art?” I asked.

“Fucking,” he said. He was 72 years old at the time. And this was way before Viagra.

Woolie Reitherman, his wife, Janie, the journalist John Culhane, John’s wife, Hind, John Lasseter and I were drinking in the bar of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D. C. one night. After quite a few rounds, Woolie produced a felt-tipped pen and began drawing on the linen tablecloth that covered our table. The drawings were of Disney characters in, let’s call them ‘compromising positions’. Before the night was over, I saw the drink glasses on the table moving, moving, moving from left to right across the table. It was John Culhane, sliding the tablecloth off the table and into his briefcase to keep as a souvenir, while Hind barred her arm across the table to keep the drink glasses from crashing to the floor.

Ward Kimball was the most consciously cuckoo human being I’ve ever met, a mirthful madman, a one-person Doo-Dah Parade. He was a subversive at heart, godfather to every flower child and acid-tripping Fantasia fan of the Sixties, the original Merry Prankster. The trombone he played was painted white with red flowers. He had a huge rare toy collection, and one of the world’s largest model train collections. In his backyard, he had installed a hundred yards of train track and several steam locomotives that he’d fire up when company came over and give them rides, him wearing his engineer’s or his conductor’s outfit. He had closets full of hats and various costumes that he’d wear on appropriate occasions. Kimball lived with a twinkle in his eye. It was that twinkle that could turn an educational film about music or math into a fantastic romp through images, ideas, history. When the gears turned in Ward Kimball’s head, you could hear the calliope playing and the circus coming to town.

I believe Ollie Johnston was the first of the Disney animators to begin building and collecting trains. Then Kimball got caught up in it, and so did Walt Disney, and it became a kind of competition between them. First, Ollie built a model steam train that could pull passengers along a track laid out around his home in Flintridge. Then Walt built a bigger model train, ‘The Carolwood Pacific’, complete with a tunnel, that you could ride around his home in Holmby Hills. Then Kimball installed the full-sized tracks and trains at his home in San Gabriel. Walt trumped the other two when he built the Disneyland Railroad that circles the theme park in Anaheim. In the mid-1960s, Ollie bought some land in Julian, California, and he and his sons and their friends personally laid half a mile of track, and installed a train with a small wood-burning steam engine Ollie had restored and christened the ‘Marie E.’, that had formerly pulled silver ore cars in the mountains. (John Lasseter has since acquired this train from the Johnston family.)

Ollie Johnston and his next-door neighbor and best friend, Frank Thomas, wrote the classic animation text, The Illusion of Life. But there was nothing illusory about the lives they, or any of the Nine Old Men, led. Their lives were full-throttle, fire-up-the-engines, strike-up-the-band, fly-the-plane-while-taking-enemy-fire, roll-in-the-hay, ride-the-wave, explore-the-jungle adventures. Their art was the mirror they held up to it all. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was, in reality, their own.

One of my most vivid memories of Ollie is from maybe ten years ago, one of the last times I saw him before he began the slow descent that ended on Monday. I invited him and Frank Thomas to visit my office and meet some of the young artists working with me who were exploring Flash animation at the time. It was decided that these artists would contribute to the development of an animation web site, frankandollie.com. It was decided to shoot some video of Frank and Ollie at Ollie’s house.

Now, by the time he was 85 years old, Ollie and his wife, Marie, had their stage set pretty much the way they wanted it. Their home was immaculate. Every book in the library was in its place. The model railroad with the coal powered steam engine that could hall a dozen passengers around their estate was in mint condition. The sunlight struck every plant in the landscaping and piece of furniture in the house just so. The design of their homestead was a long time in the making, meticulous in its rendering, palpable in its perfection.

Into this idyll rumbled the young Flash animators, feral children of the web, one of whom was Matt Strangio, a well-groomed, quietly intense student of the animation arts. To shoot reference video for the web site, one of the animators had recruited a gang of earnest amateurs — friends of his — who hauled their equipment in an enormous box truck. Ollie’s home was soon a riot of energetic vid-kids in a state of barely-controlled panic, cables running everywhere, strewn books, re-arranged furniture, blown circuit breakers, and lights that were way too hot for a couple of octogenarians. We finally reined it in enough to get some usable reference footage for a couple of characters Frank and Ollie had named ‘Nilknarf’ and ‘Revilo’. After a couple of hours of shooting, to Frank and Ollie’s obvious relief, we called it a wrap.

But there was still the matter of getting the enormous box truck back down Ollie’s driveway. The vid-kids had gotten it up the driveway okay, but had wedged it into the carport so that it was almost impossible to get it backed around and pointed down the hill. Ollie scooted back and forth, watching, mortified, as the crew forward-and-reversed the truck a couple of inches at a time. And I know that I will never, ever, see an 85-year-old human being move as fast as Ollie did when he heard the truck crunch into a gutter on the side of his house. But wait, there’s more…

A Chinese Elm that had taken Ollie 20 years to nurture into its current state of splendidness overhung the driveway. Somehow, the vid-kids had gotten their truck past the tree on their way up the driveway, but the tree had a kind of funnel shape to it, and it was a different story coming back down. One of the vid-kids had to climb onto the roof of the cab and bend the branches of the Chinese Elm to get the truck’s cargo box past them. And I know to this day that I will never, ever, seen an 85-year-old human being bend over as far backward as Ollie did to watch this scene unfold, practically parallel to the branches the vid-kid was bending. Ollie yelled up at him — as much as the quiet Ollie ever yelled — to be careful not to break any branches. I shouted cautionary advice, too. The vid-kid yelled down at us that everything was under control, and meanwhile you could hear the branches bending and cracking — Snap! Snap! Keeeee……rack! It might have been the sound of Ollie’s back breaking.

It wasn’t.

Remarkably resilient and forgiving about it, Ollie invited the animators — sans the box truck and the vid-kids — back for further collaboration, and he took Matt Strangio, in particular, under his wing. Matt did a lot of development work on Frank and Ollie’s web site, and became a truly outstanding animator in his own right.

He called what he created an illusion, but as long as someone’s stoking a steam train somewhere in the world, as long as someone’s bringing life to a drawing, the life of Ollie Johnston will remain a reality.