Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, has reportedly passed away.
Disney animator and director Ward Kimball died on July 8 at the age of eighty-eight.
Kimball joined the Disney animation staff in 1934. As one of Disney’s “nine old men,” Kimball is credited with the creation of Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio and the animation of the crow sequence in Dumbo, and he supervised the Pastoral Symphony sequence of Fantasia.
Kimball spent much of his Disney career animating and directing theatrical shorts such as “Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom” and “It’s Tough to Be a Bird”, both of which won Academy Awards for Best Animated Short.
Kimball was also well-known as the creator and leader of the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland jazz band. He had one of the world’s largest collections of antique toys and railroad memorabilia, and operated his own full-size railroad of historic steam locomotives on his orange ranch in San Gabriel, California.
(Thanks, Manton!)