American animation designer and layout artist, most notably for Disney. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Norwegian immigrant Hans Magnus Nordli (1884-1975) and Hedvig Charlotte Esterblom (1888-1976) of Swedish parentage.
Nordli, nicknamed “Ernie”, was a talented artist whose work had an appealing modern sensibility. He started at Disney in 1936. He was one of a Santa Barbara group who produced “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” the first full length cartoon film feature, in December of 1937, and served as an art director/layout artist on Dumbo and Fantasia, and worked on many of the studio’s shorts through the mid-1940s, including such Donald Duck shorts as The Plastics Inventor and Donald’s Double Trouble. He left Disney and in the 1950s became the layout artist for Chuck Jones, in the absence of Maurice Noble. He was the layout man on eight Jones shorts, including some memorable films like Broom-Stick Bunny and Rocket-Bye Baby (both 1956).
After his short stint with Jones, Nordli returned to Disney where he worked on Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, on which he was a layout stylist. He played an important role in designing the background drawing style on Dalmatians.
Nordli continued working until his death. His later credits include The Alvin Show, Gay Purr-ee (1962), Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! (1964), The Man from Button Willow (1965) and the show Johnny Cypher in Dimension Zero. Nordli also designed many comic book covers for Dell in the early-1950s.
He was married in the 1930s to artist Rosalind Couper Nordli, making their home in Santa Barbara, CA. They had two sons, of which the older one, Erik Lalo Nordli, was born 2 June 1938 and died in July 1984, by hanging himself, not to be found until six months later, when only a skeleton remained. He had been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic years before.
Ernie Nordli died in April 1968 in San Francisco, California, aged 55, according to Walt Peregoy by suicide.
Link to Wikipedia biography