Michael Barrier has pointed out an interesting footnote to animation history posted on YouTube: a 1968 protest short by Ward Kimball. Kimball was a lead animator at Disney, one of the so-called “Nine Old Men” who formed the core of the studio’s staff in its mature period through to its seventies nadir. The most overtly comic of the Nine Old Men, he was lead animator for such characters as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and the crows in Dumbo, and directed Disney’s Oscar-winning experiment with stylised animation Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953).
In 1968, on his own time, he directed Escalation, an anti-war, anti-LBJ short that makes scatalogical reference to Pinocchio. It couldn’t be further from stereotypical Disney family values. A mild adult content warning applies.
What I find interesting about this is how it flies against the typical perception of the conservativism (both artistically and politically) of the Disney studio. Whole books have been written about the studio’s ideological conformity, and there remains a fairly lazy streak of writing that constantly asserts the implicit equation Disney = family values = boring. Of course, Escalation is a private project, not a studio-sanctioned film, but I still think it’s interesting that in 1968 (perhaps the definitive year of the sixties counter-culture), one of the studio’s senior animators, a family man in his fifties, made a bawdy political film that became an underground hit amongst college students.
Kimball often struggled to find ways to express himself at Disney, and as the studio’s films became more staid during the 1950s he increasingly struggled for outlets. Yet even if the studio sometimes suppressed its staff’s more adventurous instincts, it was full of people of enormously high calibre and creative ability. That’s why the best Disney stuff (from the 1930s and 1940s) is so much more interesting than many critics – often, it seems, judging it from half-remembered viewings as children, or not distinguishing the strong periods from the weak – give it credit for.