49 Facts About Ward Kimball

Ward Walrath Kimball was an American animator employed by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Ward Kimball was part of Walt Disney's main team of animators, known collectively as Disney's Nine Old Men.

Ward Kimball's films have been honored with two Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film.

Outside of his job as an animator, Kimball was a railroad enthusiast as well as a talented jazz trombonist.

Ward Kimball founded and led the seven-piece Dixieland band Firehouse Five Plus Two, in which he played the trombone.

Ward Kimball grew up in the Midwest, often residing with his grandparents.

Ward Kimball instilled life to diverse Disney characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Jiminy Cricket, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Ward Kimball attended the Santa Barbara School of the Arts in order to become a painter and illustrator.

In March 1934, a 20-year-old Ward Kimball applied for a job at the Disney studio.

Ward Kimball served as an assistant to animator Hamilton Luske.

Ward Kimball worked primarily in the Silly Symphony series, where his film credits include the animated short films The Wise Little Hen, The Goddess of Spring, and The Tortoise and the Hare.

Ward Kimball worked on Mickey Mouse shorts, where his film credits include the short film Orphan's Benefit.

In 1936, Ward Kimball was promoted to an animator in his own right.

Ward Kimball continued to work in the Silly Symphony series.

Ward Kimball spent months working on the scene in which the Seven Dwarfs are eating soup, prepared for them by Snow White.

Ward Kimball was a strikebreaker in 1941, breaking the Disney animators' strike.

Ward Kimball was considered a "scab" by many of his peers.

Ward Kimball would remain in this position until his retirement in the 1970s.

Ward Kimball supervised or directed the animation of several Disney animated feature films.

Ward Kimball directed the character animation and sequences of the Pecos Bill segment in Melody Time.

Ward Kimball worked as a senior animator for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad.

In Cinderella, Ward Kimball was responsible for the characters Jaq and Gus and Lucifer the Cat.

Ward Kimball spent much of his career animating theatrical animated short films.

Ward Kimball served as a screenwriter for the featurette Eyes In Outer Space.

Ward Kimball wrote and directed three hour-long television shows about space exploration.

Ward Kimball was responsible for the science-fiction two-reel cartoon Cosmic Capers.

Ward Kimball worked on the live-action musical Babes in Toyland.

Ward Kimball later returned to television and directed 43 episodes of The Mouse Factory.

Ward Kimball continued to serve as a consultant on special assignments.

Ward Kimball worked on the World of Motion attraction for Disney's EPCOT Center.

Ward Kimball was profiled by producer Jerry Fairbanks in his Paramount Pictures film short series Unusual Occupations.

Ward Kimball founded and led the seven-piece Dixieland band Firehouse Five Plus Two, in which he played trombone.

Ward Kimball once said that Walt Disney permitted the second career as long as it did not interfere with his animation work.

Ward Kimball appeared on the March 17,1954, episode of You Bet Your Life, in which Groucho Marx coaxed him into playing his trombone with the house band.

Ward Kimball continued to work at Disney until 1974, working on the Disney anthology television series, being one of the writers for Babes in Toyland, creating animation for Mary Poppins, directing the animation for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and working on titles for feature films such as The Adventures Of Bullwhip Griffin and Million Dollar Duck.

Ward Kimball continued to do various projects on his own, even returning to do some publicity tours for the Disney corporation.

Ward Kimball worked on the World of Motion attraction for Disney's EPCOT Center.

Ward Kimball produced two editions of a volume titled Art Afterpieces, in which he revised various well-known works of art, such as putting Mona Lisa's hair up in curlers, showing Whistler's Mother watching TV, and adding a Communist flag and Russian boots to Pinkie.

Ward Kimball's three acting appearances on film were an uncredited role as a jazz musician in Hit Parade of 1951, an IRS Chief in Mike Jittlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time, and voicing and giving his likeness to half of the vaudeville duo "Ward and Fred" in the Mickey Mouse short The Nifty Nineties.

Ward Kimball served as host of the "Man in Space" and "Man and the Moon" episodes of Disneyland in 1955 and 1956 respectively.

Ward Kimball hosted the second season of the 1992 PBS series Tracks Ahead.

Amid Amidi wrote a biography of Kimball, Full Steam Ahead: The Life and Art of Ward Kimball that was projected for publication in the fall of 2012.

Ward Kimball was an avid railway enthusiast and donated his narrow gauge collection to the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, California.

Ward Kimball is credited with helping Walt Disney for the inspiration to install the Disneyland Railroad at Disneyland.

Ward Kimball's talents are evident in the reproduction steam locomotives built for the National Park Service at the Golden Spike National Historic Site at Promontory, Utah.

Ward Kimball helped match colors with an engine at the Smithsonian Institution and painted the artwork for the replicas of the Union Pacific No 119 and Central Pacific Jupiter built by O'Connor Engineering Laboratories for the Park Service.

Ward Kimball was in the 1975 video Model Railroading Unlimited as the host in the beginning of the movie and was showing parts of his GFRR.

In 1968, Kimball directed a two-minute animated short called Escalation, which criticized Lyndon B Johnson's Vietnam War policy.

Ward Kimball died in 2002 in Arcadia, California of complications from pneumonia at age 88.