I was fortunate enough to visit Ward at home back in the early 1990's. His house was filled with all kinds of eccentric art pieces (such as a painting of a watermelon with June bugs glued on as seeds). He had the train barn, depot, fire engine, room with hundreds of model trains and a small storage shed with vintage wind up toys. Wild stuff! He was sharp as a tack too.
Ward took a lot of credit for the Three Caballeros song sequence in later years, which pissed off the sequence's director, Gerry Geronimi. In an interview conducted in the mid-'70s, Geronimi said that most of the gags and business present in the final song were already in the storyboards, which were done by Ernie Terrazas and Homer Brightman. However, the business at the end of the song wasn't figured out beforehand. Ward frequently claimed that he spent a week lounging in Griffith Park thinking about what to do, thumbnailing his gag ideas along the way. According to a tweet from Amid Amidi on his Ward Kimball Biography account: "He worked fast on everything before that, mostly because he was worried that Fred Moore would take his shots, since Moore was pissed that he hadn’t gotten the song."
Ward Kimdall to me is the comic animator of the nine old men, thats my nickname to him and other members of the nine old men had nicknames like Eric Larson was the bird man, Marc Davis was the imagineer and Woolie Reitherman was the action guy
Throughout the part between 5:56 and 6:13, especially at 6:10 Chills by awesomeness just runs down my very spine. Kimball, thank you so much for showing us self-confidence the right way, you're absolutely the man! :D *salutes*
