Review: Todd James Pierce, The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation (2019)
Despite working at the Walt Disney studios during the Golden Age of American animation, Ward Kimball is in some ways an odd choice of subject for a biography. The animator worked mostly behind the scenes, never directed a feature film, most of his work on famous films was cut, and he was never a household name in his own lifetime. On the other hand, he is as fascinating a subject as a biographer could hope for: a talented, creative craftsman, an eccentric who built a stretch of railroad and drove a steam train around his suburban backyard, and a skilled musician who played trombone in a long-running Dixieland jazz band. Looked at this way, it's almost amazing that he found time amongst these doggedly pursued interests - what author Todd James Pierce calls his “three passions” (3) - to raise a family and to be one of Walt’s key collaborators, and the only one of the studio’s employees lucky enough to be called a “genius” by the man himself.
Pierce, attempts in The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation to fashion Kimball’s diffuse passions and activities into a single, cohesive biography, and succeeds admirably, using archival sources such as Kimball’s personal diary, and a detailed knowledge of Disney’s classic period, but maintaining clarity despite the focus on intricate detail. Pierce portrays Kimball as hardworking, doggedly pursuing the three passions listed above, a prankster, and above all an artist. Kimball's personal life is discussed a little, but the focus is very much on his work as an animator and draughtsman.
Fig. 1 - Mars and Beyond (Ward Kimball, 1957).
The Life and Times of Ward Kimball is a biography written with evident love for its subject, and for the medium of animation in general. We learn that Kimball, fueled by his ambitions of becoming a New York gallery artist, gradually came to believe that an animated film could contain several stylistically distinctive segments. This clashed with Walt Disney's wish for an overall, unified house style. Many of Kimball's sequences ended up on the cutting room floor, as Walt felt they took away too much from the main story. Years later, Kimball’s plan to lend an air of expressionist insanity to the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1951) sent him back to John Tenniel's original woodcuts for inspiration for a tea party, which he hoped would prove even more surreal than the rest of the film. This project once again failed to meet with approval, and the familiar Disney house style prevailed.
Yet, as Pierce tells it, Disney could see Kimball's talent and wanted to harness and incorporate it. By the 1950s, the company ventured into television, with the double aim of financing and promoting Disneyland (186). Walt saw a chance to put Kimball to good use, and gave him free reign to work on three TV specials, Man in Space and Man and the Moon (both 1955) and Mars and Beyond (1957) that dealt with the possibilities of space exploration in an accessible, entertaining way (Fig. 1). Kimball researched the realities of space travel using a series of articles in Collier’s Magazine as a starting point (188), and particularly relished the animated segments. Mars and Beyond in particular teems with detail, including a knowing lampoon of the space opera genre, and a speculative segment about potential life forms on Mars that verges on terrifying.
Fig. 2 - Escalation (Ward Kimball, 1968).
The impact of these imaginative programmes upon the young minds of 1950s America must have been considerable, as the programme was repeated twice by the ABC network that year (211). But it wasn't just the imaginations of a generation of children that Kimball influenced with his space-set TV specials. President Eisenhower requested a personal viewing copy of Man in Space, and two weeks later, the US government announced that they planned to launch a satellite (an announcement that would soon lead to the founding of NASA). Pierce adds a note of skepticism: “Even if Kimball’s understanding of events in Washington, DC, is only partially accurate, it still presents an amazing picture: a small group of artists at a family animation studio had produced a TV show that was being used by the president to help determine policy” (211). Though these films haven’t become part of the fabric of pop culture in the way that so many other Disney products have, they should be considered classics: they are not only remarkable syntheses of education, entertainment, and humour, impeccably realized, but may have influenced more than just the imagination of a generation of children, but provided cultural ammunition in the cold war.
Kimball stayed on at Disney until the 1970s, working on various projects. He also found time to create a personal project: Escalation (1968), a two and a half minute animated satire about Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war (Fig. 2). According to Pierce, in the wake of Walt’s passing, Kimball saw Disney eradicate much of the studio culture in which he’d grown to maturity (236). Kimball felt that Disney had become an increasingly corporate entity, but he also saw the possibilities for artistic freedom he now had. Kimball paid for Escalation himself and it screened for a countercultural audiences at an underground cinema in Los Angeles, something otherwise unheard of for a Disney animator of the old school. Increasingly dissatisfied with Disney’s direction, Kimball retired in 1973.
Fig. 3 - Characters animated by Ward Kimball for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937).
Throughout the book, Kimball comes across as hardworking, endlessly creative, and occasionally eccentric. For both Walt Disney and Ward Kimball, fantasy was not a question of genre. Walt’s conception of fantasy was immersive and escapist. To take one example of this: according to Pierce, Walt pitched the concept of Snow White to his staff in an impassioned three hour presentation in which he acted out all the roles (36). Disney’s house style, mentioned above, was intended to facilitate this immersion. Kimball, or so it seems from the book, had little interest in narrative, or in playing upon the audience’s emotions. His personal escapism was in the flow of work and in the small details of character and movement (Fig. 3). This explains why Kimball’s best work was in projects more based in documentary conventions. Kimball preferred to give a detailed inventory of Martian lifeforms, moving between them, contrasting each alien form with the next one, where Walt himself might have preferred to add a protagonist, reacting with awe, wonder, and disgust at each new lifeform and coming away from the experience with a new perspective. Looked at this way, it’s easy to see why Walt and Kimball clashed, but also why Walt respected Kimball’s attention to detail.
The Life and Times of Ward Kimball is an immensely readable biography, packed with detailed information and displaying obvious passion for its subject. Pierce's passion for Kimball and his work is palpable, and yet he never falls into the trap of presenting Kimball as a maligned auteur. Instead, he takes pains to show how Disney worked as a studio, with a productive tension between the management and the artists, and a focus on collaborative work. Pierce describes the atmosphere in the bullpen vividly, from the legwork to the boyish hijinks, to the sage advice that more senior animators such as Hamilton Luske gave to young recruits like Kimball: “You cannot caricature until you analyze, draw and show the real object, the real character” (24). Throughout the book, Pierce shows the various ways that Kimball took this advice to heart and put it to use.
**Article published: January 31, 2020**
Biography
John A. Riley is an assistant professor of English at Woosong University and SolBridge International Business School, South Korea. He has written about a diverse variety of film and media topics, from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky to the revival Twin Peaks TV series. He was a speaker at Woosong University’s TEDx event in November 2019.