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Director

Director

Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske

While all movies require collaboration, animated films are in a league of their own—most notoriously the painstakingly handcrafted early works of Walt Disney. To make even a minute of footage required countless people working in tandem, each person knowing their role and working as hard as they could.

As a result, Pinocchio doesn't have just one director—it has seven.

First, there are the film's two supervising directors:

  • Ben Sharpsteen
  • Hamilton Luske

And then there are the five sequence directors:

  • Bill Roberts
  • Norman Ferguson
  • Jack Kinney
  • Wilfred Jackson
  • T. Hee

So why are there so many cooks in the kitchen? Well, due to the nature of traditional animation, it sometimes takes months for a minute-long scene to be completed. That's a long time. As a result, animated films don't merely need directors supervising the production as a whole, but individual scenes as well.

By breaking the team down into "supervising" directors and "sequence" directors, the producers at Disney ensured that Pinocchio would be a finely polished piece of work when it finally saw release. And that's what we call a team effort.