Kimball, Ward

▪ 2003

      American animator (b. March 4, 1914, Minneapolis, Minn.—d. July 8, 2002, Arcadia, Calif.), was among the “Nine Old Men” who made Walt Disney Studios the leader of film cartoons by drawing or directing the animation of classic features and shorts (including Dumbo, Fantasia, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and The Three Caballeros) and creating television shows for Disney for 39 years. He joined the company in 1934 and worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs before developing the character of Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio (1940) and then becoming an animation supervisor. He won Academy Awards for directing the first CinemaScope cartoon, Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom (1953), and It's Tough to Be a Bird (1969). Among his most notable television productions were three 1950s programs on space exploration, Man in Space, Man on the Moon, and Mars and Beyond, which he wrote and directed while consulting with German engineer Wernher von Braun and other space-age pioneers. A skillful trombonist, Kimball led the popular Dixieland band the Firehouse Five plus Two, which appeared in films and on television.

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