July 8 - Ward Kimball

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.