July 8 - Ward Kimball

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On this day, in 2002, Ward Walrath Kimball passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born on March 4, 1914 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ward was the son of a travelling salesman, which meant he spent a good deal of his childhood living with his grandparents. His first recognizable drawing as a child was a sketch of a steam locomotive, revealing that his love of trains was indeed a lifelong passion. After graduating from Covina High School in Covina, California, Ward enrolled at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts with the intention of becoming a magazine illustrator. Around the same time Ward saw one of the Walt Disney Studio’s shorts, The Three Little Pigs, in the theater (which awed him with its artistry) one of his teachers suggested he submit his work to Disney and become an animator. In March 1934, he applied for a job at the Burbank studio and a month later he was hired as an inbetweener.

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A brilliant draftsman, it didn’t take long for Ward to be promoted to assistant animator, working under the Legendary Ham Luske. He lent his talents to Silly Symphonies for the most part, earning credits on such classics as 1934’s The Wise Little Hen and 1935’s The Tortoise and the Hare. He did get to spend a little time working with the studio’s main breadwinner, though, as part of the team that produced the Mickey Mouse short Orphan’s Benefit. By 1936, Ward had more than proven his talent and was allowed to be called the prestigious title of Animator.

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As with all of the animators the studio employed in 1936, Ward was put to work on Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As someone who preferred to work on comedic characters rather than the more realistic portrayals of people, he worked for several months on a sequence involving the dwarfs eating (or trying to eat) soup. Don't remember that part from the movie? Maybe because it was supposed to come right after the hand washing bit, but was deemed to slow things down and got cut. It worked out for Ward anyways. His work was recognized for its brilliance and following Snow White he became a supervising animator, the position he would hold for the next 37 years as part of the elite group known as Walt's Nine Old Men.

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The list of characters Ward brought to life is impressive (as are the lists of all the Old Men). It started with Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (he also designed the little conscience). He was then in charge of the Crows who sing When I See an Elephant Fly to Dumbo. He did the Bacchus sequences of Fantasia, Faline in Bambi and the sequence with the title song in it from The Three Caballeros. Next was most of the characters in Peter and the Wolf and Willy the Whale (who wanted to sing at the Met) in Make Mine Music. Melody Time brought Pecos Bill and the three birds (Donald, Jose, and the Aracuan) in Blame It on the Samba. Ward animated Ichabod Crane in his movie, all the mice plus Bruno and Lucifer for Cinderella, and a whole slew of characters for Alice in Wonderland: The White Rabbit, the Tweedles, Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Walrus and the Carpenter. His last feature film was Peter Pan where you can see his work in the Lost Boys, the Indian Chief and all three Darling Children (Wendy, John and Michael).

Image courtesy midnightonly.com

After Peter Pan, Ward stopped doing feature work almost entirely and focused on award winning shorts. He was the co-director for Melody (the studio's first 3D animated film) and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (a 1954 Oscar winner).  He wrote the script for Eyes in Outer Space, a 1959 featurette that explained how weather predictions were made. Continuing in the space theme, he wrote and directed three episodes of the Disneyland television series on space exploration. Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond, all produced in the late Fifties, long before Kennedy's promise to get to the moon, were praised for both their scientific grounding (Wernher von Braun was a consultant) and the interest they generated in humans actually going to space. The Man and the Moon episode is also a rare opportunity to see Ward himself as served as its host.

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Ward continued working on various projects throughout the Sixties. He was one of the screenwriters for Babes in Toyland. He was in charge of animating the Pearly Band for Mary Poppins. He directed the short It's Tough to Be a Bird, winning another Academy Award in 1970. As the Seventies came around, he directed the animated parts of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and ended his career creating the series and directing 43 episodes of the syndicated television show The Mouse Factory. He officially retired from The Walt Disney Company in 1974, although he stuck around for a while to consult on various things. His last actual contribution to Disneyana was designing the World of Motion attraction for the opening of EPCOT Center.

As much as Ward was an incredible animator, writer and director, there are two other aspects of his life that must be mentioned. The first was alluded to earlier, his love of trains. This was a trait he shared with the boss, Walt, and the two of them cemented their friendship over greasy engines on shiny rails. Not only did Ward help Walt destroy his wife's flower beds building a miniature railroad in the backyard, the two would go on trips together to train exhibitions and conventions as far away as Chicago. His train mania led to a hosting gig for the 1992 season of the PBS show Tracks Ahead. The second is that Ward was an accomplished jazz trombonist. He formed a dixieland jazz group, The Firehouse Five Plus Two, and released 13 albums, toured the country for three decades and even appeared in a movie, Hit Parade of 1951. Ward remarked once that Walt didn't care about his second career as long as it didn't interfere with his animation work. One final note about Ward's accomplishments is that he is the only one of the Nine Old Men who produced a piece of animation outside of Disney. In 1968, he directed a two minute short criticizing Lyndon B. Johnson and America's involvement in the Vietnam War called Escalation.

In 1989, Ward was lauded along with the rest of the Nine Old Men when he was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees. Ward and his wife of 66 years, Betty, continued to live life and make occasional public appearances until the summer of 2002 when he contracted pneumonia and passed away at the age of 88. Three years later, he was honored again when Disneyland acquired a fifth engine for its railroad, an attraction Ward was instrumental in designing and implementing, and named it the Ward Kimball. 

April 16 - Victor Haboush

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On this day, in 1924, Victor Haboush was born in Cleveland, Ohio. When Victor was just one, his family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where his father, a Lebanese immigrant, opened a grocery store. Like most teens whose parents own a business, Victor and his brothers got to spend many an hour working (or as he put it, slaving) away with dad. Joining the Coast Guard part way into World War II didn’t mean less work, but it did mean a change of location. Victor ended up being part of the forces that stormed the beaches of Normandy and, once he’d survived that ordeal, switched theaters and spent the remainder of his tour in the Pacific. One of his brothers wasn’t so lucky; he suffered a mortal wound at Leyte. During the war, Victor’s parents moved to Los Angeles, so after he was discharged, he moved into their new home and began attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena on the G.I. Bill.

While toiling away at his classes, Victor’s teacher and mentor, Lorser Feitelsen, introduced him to Eyvind Earle, a former Art Center student and current background artist at the Walt Disney Studios. Eyvind was impressed with Victor’s talent and submitted his name to the powers that be at work. The studio was desperately looking for new blood and hired him as an inbetweener at $35 a week. One week into his new job, when it became apparent just how well he could draw, Victor was transferred to the Layout Department and his salary jumped to $160 a week (a mind boggling sum to his dad, especially when all they were asking him to do was draw). He started in his new position in March 1952 on the very tail end of production on Peter Pan.

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Victor’s first real project, and his first screen credit, came on the next animated feature, Lady and the Tramp. He then teamed up with Ward Kimball on two shorts from the Adventures in Music series (okay, it was supposed to be a series but only two were ever produced): Melody and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. The latter film won the 1954 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) and is still frequently shown in classrooms today to teach kids about the different kinds of instruments. Victor rounded out the Fifties working under Wilfred Jackson on Sleeping Beauty. He estimates he spent over six months just drawing the thorn forest (and another several weeks trying to teach others the proper way to depict thorns growing).

Image copyright Disney (not that they'll admit it)

Victor was also a part of Disney’s short lived Commercials Department in the mid Fifties. Working closely with Tom Oreb, he produced ads for Cheerios, Hudson cars and Peter Pan peanut butter, among other products. Walt never cared for the work the department did and shut the department down only months after starting it up (reportedly to give his niece something to do).

By the time he was neck deep in thorns, Victor had already begun doing some freelance work, mostly on television commercials. In 1960, after doing some very early concept drawings for 101 Dalmatians, he left Disney to join Hanna-Barbera as one of the first folks on team producing The Flintstones. Unfortunately, he didn’t get along with Bill Hanna and he took a lot longer to get things done than his new studio could afford (no spending six months on thorns here), so he got fired only a few weeks into the job. While he would occasionally return to do a bit of work on The Flintstones or The Jetsons, and was instrumental in developing the Mr. Magoo series for television over at United Productions of America, Victor mostly used his newfound unemployment as a catalyst to start his own company.

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In the mid-Sixties, Victor Haboush and Associates burst onto the commercial scene. Over the next thirty years, Victor would create over 1,500 ads for a wide variety of clients, winning all kinds of Clios and Gold Lions at Cannes. Some of his more memorable campaigns include the "Crashing Bell" series for Taco Bell, "The Hook" series for Kibble N' Bits, the Jonathan Winters ads for Hefty Bag, a whole slew of McDonald's commercials (including "How the Hamburglar Got His Stripes" and "The Day Birdie the Early Bird Learned to Fly") and spots for Schlitz Malt Liquor featuring their Bull. Through it all, he credited his remaining brother as the foundation of the company as the COO with all the business sense.

After three decades of incredible work in advertising, Victor had had enough. He hung up his professional cap and retired to paint full time. He was coaxed back into the world of animation one more time. Brad Bird managed to convince him to do some concept art and character development for his 1999 film The Iron Giant. For the next decade, he quietly made his art, working and reworking each image until it met with his satisfaction. He passed away on May 24, 2009 at the age of 85.