I hope this doesn’t become a monthly-post blog of links to other sites, but it just may well become that.
While he hasn’t announced it on his own site, Amid Amidi will have an illustrated biography on Ward Kimball published next year. He says, “I hope the book will offer a portrait of Ward that goes beyond his stereotypical image as animation’s goofy madman,” and I certainly hope so too. Contrary to the marginalization of Kimball in most texts that are part of what Mike Barrier calls “The Approved Narrative” (really “Accepted”, but he told me he could care less about a differentiation), Kimball is probably the only Disney artist where a full-scale biography is truly needed. Whenever you read something like John Canemaker’s Nine Old Men (an “Approved Narrative” if there ever was one) and see these animators lined up as if they were all equals, all it reveals is that (for the most part) these artists were more or less facsimiles of each other in their work, with Kimball as the only individual.
The access to Kimball’s private library is enticing, but it worries me that it might compromise some of Amidi’s critical writing style, the problem his beautiful Cartoon Modern suffered. (In exchange for lavish illustrations, he doesn’t tell you that most of the films the book is about, as films, really are hollow, wallpaper.) “Thorough celebration” tends to be a red flag for “everything this man touched is worth something”, but fortunately Kimball’s life and career was so eclectic that it’d be quite easy to avoid the pratfall of giving the lesser film works the same importance as the best ones and just give them the brushoff they deserve.
To supplement the post, here’s an example: Kimball’s 1968 anti-Vietnam short Escalation, the sort of underwhelming satirical filmmaking that dominated his later period, highlighting political bromides presented in a faux-arty manner. The “Johnson” joke is lame too.
He’s without question my favorite animator. But yeah, there’s a lot that people don’t know about him. He was a genius no doubt, but genius is usually borderline insanity, and aside from his zany style, the odd parts of his personality have been left out of most books. I got to hear a few of them transcribing some of his interviews, but I look forward to more in Amid’s book.
Ward Kimball is often noted as the most radical of the Nine Old Men. That might have been so stylistically, but his work as an animator, like the others became increasingly rigid as time went on.
From what I recall in John Canemaker’s book, distinguishing the Nine Old Men is more difficult for some than for others. Especially if now the challenge is giving them separate recognition, does Les Clark or Eric Larsen deserve as much attention as Milt Kahl or Marc Davis?