Take One (Nov 1978)

AUTO Ward Kimball and friends. The man who gave life to Jiminy Cricket and created Alice's tea party. The Old Master ESMOND CHOUEKE before graduating from high school in Santa Barbara, California. (“It showed me a wide cross-section of people,” he says now.) He claims to have learned to read by reading the comics, and by six was a “street car fanatic” and an inveterate collector: of comic pages, of street car transfers and cigar bands. He went to the Santa Barbara School of the Arts on a scholarship, and then in ‘34, he needed a job. “T thought I'd be painting backgrounds when I joined Walt,” Kimball says. “But I was doing animation right away—and I soon found out how tough it was to make things move. I'd seen The Three Little Pigs a couple of times, and I'd been impressed by a Silly Symphony called Father Noah's Ark because when all the animals ran into the ark they all ran as they should. Yet, I found that even drawing simple Mickey—two circles— was tough, drawing him in various poses and from all angles. But animation was something I liked. I guess I had a feeling for staging and acting and a little bit of math, and beyond that, there was a tremendous challenge in being able to give life to anything. A steamshovel with eyes becomes something alive, or that scene when the cyclone is coming and all the animals run away and then the barns see the storm and they run away, too. That sort of silly thing appealed to me.” The studio turned out hundreds of cartoon shorts through the late ‘30s and ‘40s—121 Mickey Mouses, 51 Goofys, 48 Plutos, 126 Donald Ducks, etc. One of the early ones (on which Kimball was an “in-betweener,” an artist who fills out a character's motions) was called Orphans' Benefit , and it featured a show where Mickey played the _ piano, Clarabelle Cow sang, and a certain Donald Duck attempted to recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. “The Duck had appeared earlier in ‘34 in a cartoon called The Wise Little Hen ,” Kimball says. “But he had only quacked. What happened was that there was a milkman named Ducky Nash who used to come to the studio and he did animal sounds. One of them was a duck. “Walt heard him one day and thought that a talking duck was an awfully good idea. In Orphans’ Benefit , when Donald would try to recite the poem he would get interrupted and he’d fly into a rage. So there was the birth of a character—a talking, very excitable duck.” Despite the success of the shorts, Kimball says that Walt understood that the cartoon short was a_ threatened species. In ‘37 Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cartoon feature ever—and with Disney's single-frame, fullanimation technique, a film composed of more than one and a quarter million individual exposures. “There was a lot of skepticism when it came out,” Kimball says. “People said audiences wouldn't sit through an hour and a half of cartoons. People wouldn't laugh for more than 10 minutes, they said, or the bright colors would give them eye strain. But Walt was building a story, not just drawing laughs. I remember the premiere in Los Angeles, the people arriving in Packards and Pierce-Arrows. They started off laughing but later the whole theatre was crying—Clark Gable had tears in his eyes. That had never happened before, a cartoon with that kind of pathos and warmth. We knew Walt was good, but around then we all got to thinking Ol’ Disney’s going to be remembered.” Next came Pinocchio, on which Kimball was a supervising animator in charge of Jiminy Cricket. ‘Jiminy started out looking more like a cockroach or a grasshopper,” Kimball says. “But Walt said he wasn’t. cute enough. Eventually what he became was a human figure with a green, egg-like head.” And then there was Fantasia, whose episodic and imaginative nature was praised as a breakthrough by some and criticized as pretentious by others. Betty Kimball worked on Fantasia along with Ward, but she gave up her job as a Disney artist in favor of a family. There were three Kimball children; today two are artists, one is an animator. Dumbo, in ‘41 remains Ward Kimball’s favorite of all the features. It was the least TAKE ONE / NOVEMBER 1978 39