March 29 - Jack Kinney

On this day, in 1909, John Ryan Kinney was born somewhere in Utah. By his teens, Jack's family had moved to Los Angeles, California where he was a football player at John C. Fremont High School with Roy Williams (who would later become the Big Mooseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club). In February 1931, he began working at the Walt Disney Studio as an animator. He worked on Mickey Mouse shorts like The Band Concert and Silly Symphonies like The Cookie Carnival. He then moved into the story department and became a story director for Mickey and Pluto shorts. Some of his credits in this phase are the classics Brave Little Tailor, Mickey's Trailer and Bone Trouble.

By 1940, Jack had moved to sequence director for feature films. He worked on sections of Pinocchio, Dumbo, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. During World War II, Jack help direct the animated documentary Victory Through Air Power and won an Academy Award for the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face.

Image copyright Disney

During the same time Jack was directing sequences for the feature films, he was one of two directors for all the Donald shorts (Jack King was the other) and he was the main director for all the Goofy shorts from 1940 until 1945. He is credited with the creation of Goofy's How to... series and directed the only Goofy short to ever receive an Oscar nomination, How to Play Football.

Image copyright Disney

As the Fifties began, Jack began directing some of the Walt Disney Specials series of shorts. 1954's Pigs Is Pigs nabbed him a third Academy Award nomination. The same year, he also directed The Lone Chipmunks, Chip and Dale's final short. Jack then briefly moved into television animation, putting together episodes of the Disneyland series, but the writing was on the wall. When the Shorts Department was dissolved in 1958, so was Jack's position. After 27 years with Disney, he no longer had a place to hang his hat.

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Not to be deterred, Jack started his own studio with Hal Adelquist, another former Disney man looking for a new home. Their first project was a feature for UPA/Columbia featuring Mr. Magoo, an adaptation of 1001 Arabian Nights. He then teamed up with his younger brother Dick (who had also been an animator for Disney) to produce a new television series of Popeye the Sailor. Then he became a story man for The New Three Stooges. He eventually landed at Hannah-Barbera in the late Seventies as a story director for Saturday morning fare like Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo and it was there that he ended his career in 1983.


Also in 1983, Jack was awarded the Windsor McCay Award at that years Annies for his lifetime of contributions to the art of animation. In 1988, he published a short memoir titled Walt Disney and Other Assorted Characters, detailing his years in Burbank. On February 9, 1992, Jack passed away quietly at his home in Glendale, California. He was 82.