--- name: "Jack Kinney" canonical: "https://film.one/person/jack-kinney" roles: ["Director"] born: "29 March 1909" died: "9 February 1992" reviewed_on_fi1m: 2 average_fi1m_score: 88 updated: "2026-09-17T05:55:33.984069+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Jack Kinney Director. Born 29 March 1909 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Died 9 February 1992. ## Details - **Work:** Director - **Born:** 29 March 1909, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA - **Died:** 9 February 1992 - **Active:** 1940–1941 - **Also known as:** John Ryan Kinney - **Works often with:** [Ben Sharpsteen](https://film.one/person/ben-sharpsteen.md), [Bill Roberts](https://film.one/person/bill-roberts.md), [Frank Churchill](https://film.one/person/frank-churchill.md), [Norm Ferguson](https://film.one/person/norman-ferguson.md), [Walt Disney](https://film.one/person/walt-disney.md), [Wilfred Jackson](https://film.one/person/wilfred-jackson.md) - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3157236, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0455741/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/74565 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Pinocchio*](https://film.one/film/pinocchio.md) (88), [*Dumbo*](https://film.one/film/dumbo.md) (87) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Jack Kinney > 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. 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. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, catalog.afi.com.* ## On Fi1m (2) - *Dumbo* (1941), Fi1m 87, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/dumbo.md) - *Pinocchio* (1940), Fi1m 88, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/pinocchio.md) ## Gallery - ![Pinocchio (1940)](https://film.one/media/title/1692/still-d4a00ca55d6c.jpg) *Pinocchio* (1940) - ![Dumbo (1941)](https://film.one/media/title/12283/still-62554117546b.jpg) *Dumbo* (1941) ## Also known for - *The Three Caballeros* (1944), Director - *The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad* (1949), Director - *Fun and Fancy Free* (1947), Director - *Saludos Amigos* (1942), Director - *Popeye the Sailor* (1960), Director, Writer - *Melody Time* (1948), Writer, Director - *The Legend of Sleepy Hollow* (1949), Director - *Make Mine Music* (1946), Director --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/jack-kinney