Born: Ward Walrath Kimball
Birthday: March 4, 1914
Location: MN, U.S
Alma mater:  Santa Barbara School of the Arts
Occupation: Animator, Director, Producer, Writer
Years active: 1934–1980
Died: July 8, 2002

Ward Kimball attended the Santa Barbara School of the Arts to become a painter and illustrator. One of his instructors recommended he submit his work to Walt Disney Productions. Kimball put together a portfolio of life drawings and various sketches and applied for a job at the Disney studio in person. Walt himself approved of Ward’s drawings hired him in 1934.

The 20-year-old Kimball, thought he’d been hired as a background painter and was disappointed when he showed up Monday morning and was told he was going to be an inbetweener. He learned under the tutelage of Ben Sharpsteen and eventually grew to like the challenge of inbetweening.

Ward was quickly promoted to an assistant animator for Hamilton “Ham” Luske on the Silly symphony shorts. His earliest film credits include The Wise Little Hen, The Goddess of Spring, Orphan’s Benefit, Pluto’s Judgement Day, and The Tortoise and the Hare.

In 1936, he became a full animator continuing to work in the Silly Symphony series. He animated Toby Tortoise Returns and More Kittens shorts and in August of that year, he married Betty Lawyer from the ink and paint department.

When he was assigned work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ward was the youngest full-fledged animator on the film. He spent months on a scene of the Seven Dwarfs eating a soup Snow White prepared for them. Unfortunately, his scene ended up on the cutting room floor in the interests of the movie’s running time.

Kimball was next promoted to a directing animator designing a new character for Disney Studio’s Pinocchio; Jiminy Cricket. Ward made over a dozen frustrating drafts before finalizing his design. Jiminy’s coat was modeled after the man on the Johnny Walker scotch bottle’s morning coat since the coattails curve and split in the middle resembling cricket wings. Ward continued on to design and animate the crows for Dumbo, giving each a distinct appearance and personality.

During the Disney Strike of 1941, Kimball was a strikebreaker and labelled a “scab” by his picketing peers.

Kimball supervised or directed the animation for several more of Disney’s animated feature films. He was responsible for the scenes of Bacchus chasing the centaurettes in the Pastoral Symphony segment of Fantasia, The Reluctant Dragon, and the trio of Donald Duck, José Carioca, and Panchito Pistoles singing the title song in The Three Caballeros.

He developed a reputation as a prankster at the studio. Ward and fellow Disney animator Fred Moore voiced and animated likenesses of themselves as the vaudeville duo “Ward and Fred” in the Mickey Mouse short The Nifty Nineties.

Outside of work, he was a jazz trombonist, forming and leading the Firehouse Five Plus Two in 1948, a seven-piece Dixieland band made up of fellow Disney employees like Frank Thomas. Their band recorded 13 albums and toured clubs, college campuses and jazz festivals until early ‘70s.

Kimball also indulged a lifelong love of trains, collecting toy and miniature trains, even building a backyard railroad with a full-size coal-fired locomotive at his home. Ward, along with Ollie Johnston, inspired Walt Disney’s to build his own backyard railroad and the Disneyland amusement park railroad in Anaheim, California.

Kimball directed the Pecos Bill segment in Melody Time and served as a senior animator for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. In Cinderella, he was responsible for the character animation of Jaq and Gus and Lucifer the Cat. In Alice in Wonderland, he led the animation for Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter and his tea party, as well as the Cheshire Cat. He earned film credits for feature films Peter Pan and Mary Poppins. For Bedknobs and Broomsticks, he mixed animated animal soccer players with real people in a very convincing way.

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Ward Kimball became the only animator to run his own in-studio production team without Walt Disney’s oversight. Ward co-directed the Disney studio’s first animated 3D short Melody with Charles August “Nick” Nichols. They also made Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom in widescreen CinemaScope, earning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1954.

He developed several nonfiction animation programs about space exploration that sparked the public interest in spaceflight and paved the way for NASA in the ‘50s. Kimball wrote, directed, and hosted three hour-long episodes of Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series; Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond. He was also screenwriter for the Eyes In Outer Space featurette, a film that combined live action and animation to explain how weather satellites are used to predict the weather.
Ward and Walt’s working relationship came to a rift over a political impasse in the mid-‘60s. When Walt Disney passed away in 1966, Kimball was away in Paris when he heard the news.

Kimball directed Escalation in 1968, an independent two-minute satirical animated short criticizing Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam War policy. Escalation was the only animated cartoon made by one of Disney’s Nine Old Men outside of the Disney Studios.

Within the studio, Kimball directed the short films It’s Tough to Be a Bird and Dad, Can I Borrow the Car? In life, Walt himself accepted all awards won by the studio, but when It’s Tough to Be a Bird earned an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1970, Ward took to the stage and made a brief acceptance speech.

Despite became increasingly aware of the shifting studio’s culture, yearning for the vitality of the early days and lamenting the growing corporate impersonality, Ward continued his work at Disney. He made the Disney anthology television series, animating titles for feature films such as The Adventures Of Bullwhip Griffin and Million Dollar Duck, and producing and directing 43 episodes of The Mouse Factory TV series.

Retiring from Disney in 1972, Kimball maintained ties with the studio as a consultant for special assignments. He contributed to the Disney’s EPCOT Center’s World of Motion attraction and returned for publicity tours for the Disney corporation. He and other leading Disney animators joined for a whistle-stop tour to promote Mickey Mouse’s 50th birthday in 1978.

Ward also pursued various projects on his own, writing two editions of Art Afterpieces, books in which he put a comical spin on various well-known artworks, like putting Mona Lisa’s hair up in curlers, and showing Whistler’s Mother watching TV.

Kimball received many honors over the course of his lifetime, and in 1989 was named a Disney Legend.

In 2005, the Disneyland Railroad christened its newest locomotive, No.5 the “Ward Kimball” in his memory.