JIM KORKIS: It seems to me that the biggest problem for the early Disney animators was not drug abuse but alcohol abuse like Fred Moore’s.

WARD KIMBALL: He’d start drinking around noon and by two o’clock he was fairly drunk and would swagger into a room asking, “Who would like a punch in the nose?” He also had the habit of taking off his coat and tossing it onto a coat rack. One day, I stole a saw and sawed the coat rack in three places and put it back together with transparent tape. The next time he tossed his coat, the entire pole fell apart. Somebody complained that he was getting so drunk he couldn’t finish his animation on The Reluctant Dragon, so I’d come back in the evenings and finish up some scenes for him.

JK: Didn’t one of Walt’s brothers have a little drinking problem?

WK: You’re probably thinking of Ray. He drank fairly heavily, but I still bought insurance from him. He was an insurance salesman. Ray would visit the studio and the Story Department wouldn’t let him come in with his big cigar. So he would leave it on a window sill. While he was inside, one of the story guys would snip the cigar in half or down to a little stub. Ray would come out and be puzzled about what happened to his cigar. This happened all the time and he never seemed to catch wise.

One day, I went over to get a copy of my insurance policy and he wouldn’t let me into his apartment. I had to plead that I had an appointment and just wanted a copy of my policy. He finally opened the door and it was pitch black inside. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that all around the place were those horseshoe flower wreaths that people put on graves. Apparently, he thought they were pretty and was going up to Forest Lawn and stealing them to use as decorations. On one wall was a bulletin board with yellowed newspaper clippings saying: “Walt Disney does this...” and “Walt Disney announces that...,” etc. But I got the feeling they were there not because he was proud of his brother but jealous of Walt.

JK: Animators often put themselves in their work. Which character that you worked on do you feel most resembles you?

WK: Lucifer the cat from Cinderella.

JK: You think you’re like an evil cat?

WK: You know, Walt Disney hated cats because they wouldn’t do what he told them. Walt needed to dominate. Maybe that’s why he always put up a wall between himself and others. Walt never really liked cats—anything in the cat family. Dogs you could train and tell ’em exactly what to do. Walt didn’t like cats because you could never control them. Somebody once said that all the despots of history—Napoleon, Henry VIII, Disney—never liked cats because they wouldn’t conform to their wishes. He really didn’t like interviews for the same reason. I suppose he was a little afraid or something that he might say the wrong thing. Walt wanted to be in control of the situation.

JK: So like a cat, you wouldn’t always do what Walt wanted?

WK: Walt was stubborn. Once he got something in his head that was it. I remember one time when he got really mad at me. I was working on the script for Babes in Toyland because if the picture was not put into production soon, the studio would lose the rights to do the story. So while Walt was over in Europe, somebody in the Publicity Department, to guarantee that the other studios knew Disney was doing the film, put a full-page ad in the trades that read, “Congratulations to Ward Kimball as he starts direction on Disney’s Babes in Toyland.” Well, Walt had wanted me to direct, but when he got back from Europe and saw the notice he thought I was pushing myself. So he removed me from the picture. I went in and pointed out that it was the Publicity Department that had done it and I even named the names of the guys involved. But Walt was stubborn and that was it.

JK: It seems to me you weren’t always the innocent party. I think you probably stirred up Walt occasionally on purpose.

WK: Walt would often call me up in the middle of the night with an idea or something to discuss and he’d always say, “Ward, this is Walt.” And I would always respond, “Walt WHO?” Then he’d get upset and yell, “Walt DISNEY for chrissake!” I told him, “Well, I know a lot of Walts.”

JK: I am still just amazed that Lucifer the cat is such a favorite of yours.

WK: I didn’t like the Cricket. That’s a fact. On the model sheet, I drew all these heads looking in every direction. We had these little figurines that they do out of Plaster of Paris and paint them. I have nine of those. The Cricket standing there in different poses. You can turn them around and see the 3D.

I like Lucifer the cat and the mice I did in Cinderella. Here’s a remarkable thing: I collect a lot of old antique toys and there never seemed to be many good images made of the Cinderella characters. All of a sudden, in a toy magazine, I saw a handcar with Gus-Gus, the little fat mouse, and Jaq with this handcar, like the old Lionel thing with Mickey and Minnie. I couldn’t believe it. I sent for it. It was in mint condition. They even had a pose of Lucifer on the side stalking these guys who were pumping. I had a lot of fun with Lucifer and the mice. It makes me smile even today.

DIDIER GHEZ: There is one project that always intrigued me, which is the one you started with John Lasseter, called The Wild Things. Can you tell me more about that project?

GLEN KEANE: John and I had just seen the film Tron (1982). We were working on Mickey’s Christmas Carol at the time. John had just become an animator there. We both came back from the theatre right across the street really questioning what we were doing with animation. I remember coming back to my office and being kind of depressed. I felt like they were doing what was really exciting and we were doing dumb, flat drawings. There the computer was moving in three dimensions, you could go in the world, it was all so real and motorcycles were moving around and it was just...wow! It was eye candy!

John and I talked the same way. We were saying, “I just wish we could do something where the background was giving us the opportunity to bring the cartoon character into that world. That would really be cool.” So we started thinking about an idea for doing that.

John had read this story, The Brave Little Toaster. He showed me this book and he said, “Wouldn’t this be a great project to do for an animated film using nothing but the computer?” I said, “Wow! This is really cool! Maybe we can do the backgrounds and then we can animate the characters and solid kinds of shapes…”

We figured we had better do a test first and we came up with this idea of Where the Wild Things Are. We both liked that story by Maurice Sendak.

We did a little test where the kid Max is drawing his name on the wall and the dog is watching him. Actually, the dog is under the bed, and when Max finishes drawing on the wall, the camera follows him as he looks under the bed at this little dog upside down.

The dog raises toward the camera, looking at you. The camera lifts up as the dog runs down the hall and he runs after the dog. There is this chase of the little boy and the dog down this staircase. We were just willing to try and explore how we would do all this and to try and color it, to try and put shading, so that it would look like these characters were fitting into this world. Nobody had ever done that before. That was the first time computer backgrounds had been combined with animation.

And we went to that company in New York which had worked on Tron and it worked. It was just a nice little short piece, a wonderful film.

(According to Charles Solomon, in The History of Animation: Lasseter constructed a model of Max’s bedroom and the adjoining hall in the computer’s memory. After the artists calculated the rates of movements for Max and his dog, the computer produced simple models, showing where the characters would be in each frame. Keane animated the characters, using the computer printouts as guides. When his drawings were entered into the computer and colored, the characters were placed in the computer-generated environment.

In the resulting footage, the camera seemed to follow Max as he chased the hapless dog around the bedroom and through the hall, jumped over the banister, and pursued his pet down the stairs. Keane’s animation captured the personalities of the characters and made them seem alive. The computer made it possible to use the complex tracking shot, which would be virtually impossible to do in conventional animation, as it would be too difficult to draw everything in perspective. This experiment helped lead to the use of a computer-generated environment for the climax of The Great Mouse Detective.)

After that, we started to develop The Brave Little Toaster and John really went on to work much more in depth on that and I started to work on The Great Mouse Detective. That was the first time when we actually brought the computer into our film, at the end in the big chase up in Big Ben.

John, meanwhile, went on and left Disney. By that point, his interests went completely into computers and he ran off in that direction. Disney at that time was also really struggling financially and Brave Little Toaster became a project that was sacrificed. There were a lot of political problems at the time. I am not going to go into all of that.

So John left to develop computer animation and I kept focusing more and more on hand-drawn animation. I guess it was at a time when I had explored enough with the computer to know where my heart was. It was in drawing. I loved the feel of the graphite on the paper.

For John, drawing was always a frustrating thing. It was a necessary evil. For me, it’s the greatest joy. Animation is never as good as when I am sitting at that desk drawing. That’s the best. Even when it’s up on the screen, it’s never as wonderful as the moments when it was drawn.

DG: How was The Wild Things received by the studio?

GK: We showed it to the studio executives and everybody and they were all very excited. They thought it was really cool and interesting. But animation was at such a point there, and there was not much foresight in management at the time to see how to implement it at Disney.

Today, with a whole different spirit in animation here, a test of that magnitude and a discovery like that would just be eaten up and incorporated into a film. In those days, it took a lot longer. Still, it was the beginning. The clockwork stuff was beginning to develop in The Great Mouse Detective and on from there. It planted the seed. It just took a while to get it going.