Benjamin Luther Sharpsteen (1895-1980) was an animator who, after working for the Fleischer Studios, joined Walt Disney in 1929 and stayed there for thirty-three years. He was responsible for training many of the studio’s animators.
Sharpsteen worked on many shorts, and was a sequence director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), before acting as supervising director on two early Disney classics, Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941). He was also production supervisor on Fantasia (1940), Cinderella (1950) and Alice in Wonderland (1951).
In the 1950s, Sharpsteen also worked in television on much of Disney’s live-action programming. Two of his documentaries, one of them a short, won Oscars in 1959.
In 1934, Sharpsteen was responsible for the Disney footage in MGM’s Hollywood Parade.
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