Ward Kimball, a pioneering animator at Walt Disney's studios and one of the legendary "nine old men" whose work set the standards by which animation is judged, died on July 8th aged 88, after a life spent creating colourful, eccentric and humorous cartoons.
An impish character himself, he sent up his fellow animators in gag cartoons, and even caricatured Disney himself.
Ward Kimball's skill, sense of timing and irreverence were combined in the characters and situations he created, whether it was Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, the crows in Dumbo, or a madcap tea-party in Alice In Wonderland.
Disney recognised his innovative qualities and gave him responsibility for co-directing the first 3D Disney cartoon, Adventures In Music: Melody (1953), and Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom (1953), the first CinemaScope cartoon, which won an Academy Award. Ward Kimball won a second Oscar for It's Tough To Be A Bird (1969). In The Story Of Walt Disney, Diane Disney Miller quotes her father as saying, "Ward is one man who works for me that I am willing to call a genius." Outside the world of animation, Ward Kimball's eccentric humour was probably best displayed in Art Afterpieces (1964), which had him drawing moustaches and blacking out teeth on advertisements, and "improving" the Mona Lisa, Venus and Adonis, and other masterpieces.
His love of music led to the formation of the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland jazz band with Ward Kimball on trombone and fellow "nine old man" Frank Thomas on piano. The band played dances at the Disney studio, before graduating to nightclubs, television appearances and 12 albums.
Born in Minneapolis on March 4th, 1914, Ward Kimball's introduction to Disney came in 1934, when an instructor at Santa Barbara School of Arts persuaded him to submit his portfolio to the studio. At his interview, he asked for an instant decision because he had insufficient money to get to Los Angeles a second time. Six months later, he got his first solo assignment, animating a grasshopper-musician in the Silly Symphony cartoon Woodland Cafe (1937).
Ward Kimball almost quit in 1937 when Disney told him that, because the feature-length Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was running long, the scene he had been working on for months was to be cut. The lost soup scene - in which, as Snow White and the dwarfs sit down to eat soup, their slurping and clinking turns into a song - became legendary among fans; it remains a classic that has only ever been seen in pencil animation.
Disney diverted Ward Kimball's frustration with Pinocchio (1940), offering him the opportunity to create one of the central characters, Jiminy Cricket, the conscience of the marionette who wants to be a real boy. Ward Kimball rejected more than a dozen versions before Jiminy emerged. "I ended up with a little man who looks like Mr Pickwick, but with no ears, no nose and no hair," he recalled. "The audience accepts him as a cricket because the other characters say he is."
Ward Kimball was the animation supervisor on the sequence of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in Fantasia (1940), and Dumbo (1941), which he later called his favourite Disney project because, as long as they kept within budget, the animators were given a free hand to let their imaginations run loose. His mastery of visual comedy is probably best seen in The Three Caballeros (1945), as Donald Duck, Jose Carioca and Panchito maniacally perform the final title number.
He was also involved in Make Mine Music and Peter And The Wolf (both 1946), Melody Time (1948), a contemporary Fantasia set to the music of Roy Rogers, the Andrews Sisters and others, Cinderella (1950), in which he animated Lucifer the cat, Peter Pan (1953), Mary Poppins (1964) and Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971).
Ward Kimball was among those who helped develop the Tomorrowland section of Disney's theme park, and for the Disneyland TV series he directed Man In Space (1955), a show that won a complimentary call from President Eisenhower. He followed up this success with Man On The Moon (1955) and Mars And Beyond (1957).
His other Disney credits include the script of the live-action fantasy Babes In Toyland (1961), and producing and directing 43 episodes of the syndicated series The Mouse Factory (1972-73).
After retiring in 1973, Ward Kimball concentrated on his other great interest, railways. Back in 1938, he had built the fullsized Grizzly Flats Railroad, with a 64,000lb steam locomotive, dating from 1881, which he restored and ran over 900 feet of track in his three-acre garden in San Gabriel, California. A former president of the Train Collectors' Association, in 1992 he donated part of his system to the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, California.
In 1978, he was the conductor on a whistle-stop train journey from Los Angeles to New York to celebrate Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday.
He is survived by Betty, his wife of 66 years, two daughters and a son.
Ward Kimball: born 1914; died, July 2002