They were young, radical, and inventing an art form from scratch, yet Walt Disney nicknamed them the Nine Old Men. This episode is a collective biography of the core animators at Walt Disney Productions: Les Clark, Wolfgang Reitherman, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston. We follow them from Les Clark's arrival in 1927 alongside Ub Iwerks on the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, through the crucible of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the film the press called Disney's Folly, where they had to invent the physics and emotion of a drawn world.

We explain where the nickname really came from (a 1936 bestseller attacking the U.S. Supreme Court), why it functioned as an elevation rather than an insult, and how each man developed a distinct specialty, from Kimball's surreal comedy to Kah ...