Milton Kahl, Top Animator for Walt Disney

Milton Kahl, one of Walt Disney’s “nine old men” of animation, a select group of artists and draftsmen who brought “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” to life, has died.

Kahl was 78 when he died of pneumonia Sunday in a Mill Valley hospital.

The illustrator, admired by generations for his distinctive style and ability to meld character, dimension and balance into the human figures in the Disney repertoire, had retired in 1976 after 42 years at the studio drawing board.

He was involved in the first Disney feature film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” in 1937 and continued to draw through “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.

In addition to his animation, Kahl was responsible for the design of some characters and influenced the style of many of the pictures.

Charles Solomon, animation critic and historian, said Kahl was “among the best two or three draftsmen the studio ever had. He drew with enormous skill and often subtlety.”

Solomon cited Prince Phillip in “Sleeping Beauty” as an example of that subtlety, commenting on the balance between grace and masculinity that Kahl achieved.

Animation Director

Kahl was animation director on many of the most successful Disney films--”Pinocchio,” “Make Mine Music,” “Song of the South,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Lady and the Tramp” and “101 Dalmations.”

His Shere Kahn the tiger in “The Jungle Book” and Merlin in “Sword in the Stone” were widely praised, as was Edgar the Butler in the just-reissued “The Aristocats.”

Marc Davis, one of the five surviving artists from the original group Walt Disney gathered around him in the mid-1930s, remembered Kahl as “the most extraordinary pure animator” at the studio. “He was a master draftsman, better than anyone else at the studio, but he wasn’t interested in just drawing things. He was interested in moving them and acting.”

Citing his drawings of the unusual wizards’ duel in “Sword in the Stone” and the eccentric llama in “Saludos Amigos,” Davis added that his former colleague was almost penalized because of those skills.

“He did the straight characters who had to carry the stories in the features.”

Kahl, who joined Disney after a successful commercial art career in the San Francisco area, is survived by his wife, Julie, two children and two grandchildren.