A Disney journeyman who found his one great subject in Goofy, a tall dog who cannot play any sport and demonstrates them all. His cartoons are fast, rough and funny; his feature work is buried among other men's names, ours included.
Fi1m perspective
Goofy steps up to show us how to play football. He is going to fall over, and so is everyone else on the field, and the pleasure lies in watching a long, loose-limbed dog carry out the demonstration until the exact second it goes wrong. Jack Kinney directed 39 of these Goofy shorts between 1940 and 1953, most of them the 'How to...' series, and he knew what he had. He said later that he liked the Goof because he was a nice long, lean character you could move, one you could get crazy poses out of. That is the method: pose him, hold it, let the fall do the rest.
He had come to the studio in 1931 as an animator, moved into story, and was directing shorts from 1940. Through that decade he was one of the sequence directors on ten Disney features, among them Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and the package films of the war years, and he directed The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) at the tail of that era. When the shorts unit closed in 1957–58 he left, made 1001 Arabian Nights (1959) for UPA, set up his own company and spent the rest of his working life on television cartoons, Popeye among them, into the late 1980s.
We should be honest about how much of the features is his. Dumbo credits six directors and speaks with one voice, and we cannot tell you which minutes belong to Kinney. The night the tent goes up in the rain, elephants pushing poles in the mud while lightning shows the canvas a second at a time, is the passage that gets us every time we watch it, and we would like to believe it was his, and we have no grounds for believing it. In Pinocchio we did not pick him out at all.
The shorts are where the man is visible, and there he is easy to read. He worked broad and fast and hands-off, he was less careful than Wilfred Jackson, and he liked a chase. "I always try to get a chase someplace," he said, "in the last hundred, hundred and fifty feet, going like a bat out of hell." Rushed work shows in the drawing, as his colleagues noticed, but pace forgives a great deal in a seven-minute cartoon. Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), his Donald Duck war cartoon, is the other side of him: a sharp, musical piece of satire with no slack in it. The Popeye television work is another matter, made cheaply and looking it, and we would not send anyone there.
Do not go to him for the features; he is in them somewhere, and nobody can say where. Go to How to Play Football (1944) and the rest of the run, and watch a tall dog fall over with total conviction. It is not a large legacy. It is a reliable one, which in a cartoon is the rarer thing.
Biography
Jack Kinney (born John Ryan Kinney) was an American animator, director and producer of animated shorts. He joined Walt Disney Productions in 1931 as an animator and later became a sequence director on several feature films, including Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941).
Kinney directed numerous shorts, notably many in the Goofy series, and the Academy Award-winning Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face (1943). He also directed segments or served as director on package films such as Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1944), Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948) and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). He left Disney in 1958 to form his own studio and later worked on the Popeye the Sailor television series.
