Escalation - A Film by Ward Kimball



Interesting coincidence. I was correcting this weekend an interview with Ward Kimball by Richard Shale which will be included in Walt's People - Volume 5, and which mentions Kimball's privately produced short Escalation, a short I was extremely curious to see. That short happens to have been posted on YouTube this weekend thanks to the Kimball family and to Ted Thomas. Here is what Kimball said about it in the interview that will be released in Walt's People - Volume 5:

[Richard Shale: Is Escalation the only film you did outside the Studio?

Ward Kimball: Yes. It's recognized as the first animated editorial cartoon. And it was an underground film, believe it or not.
We were getting involved in Vietnam... 500,000 troops. And like so many other people, I’d just come back from Europe, and all my friends, in the different studios, in Copenhagen, Paris… were all asking, "Why are you doing this in Vietnam?" And I didn't know. Everybody said it was wrong. I said it was wrong. So I decided to do a cartoon on my own. First time I'd ever done that. I did it all with my own money: a three-minute picture. It was all shown underground, because this was before censorship had been lifted. And to compare the growing of Johnson's nose to an erect penis, which it finally achieves at the end, was shocking. It was all done to The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The first chorus was sung by Johnson. Paul Frees did it in his twang and where he pronounces the word sword: "swwword" [w is heard] and an out-of-tune guitar is heard behind the voices. We used a big choir like the Mormon Tabernacle: it was Los Angeles City College. Finally, the brass is added to the trumpets. But every time the word truth… we come to that bar where you say the word truth, which he says at the end: [whistle sound like a censor's bleep.] Remember they used to have on TV if you mentioned the other guy's product, you have a cuckoo. Even with the big brass ensemble at the end, it stopped for that little cuckoo. And it just tore up audiences. It was first run down at the [Cinema?] Theatre in Hollywood. I had it run there so it'd be accredited to go into the Academy Awards. It was a facetious [garbled] The guy called me up and said, "You ought to come down here." They were running the Newport Jazz Festival film. And he had run it three times the night before. I came in in the middle of a show—full house—and it just tore them up. Now, the film is rather conservative as far as our moral standards are concerned. The openness in treatment you now have: scenes in bed and everything… but it’s still recognized in the industry as the first editorial animated cartoon.

RS: What year did you do that?

WK: It was released about three months before Johnson decided not to run.

RS: So that would be '68?

WK: Yeah. It would be in the latter part of '67, first part of '68. Here's an interesting thing about this film. I had asked certain guys to help me, like my cutter who worked with me on Disney TV. He didn't want to touch it. He thought he'd be harassed by the IRS or something. Well, this has all come out in Watergate: the pressure of using agencies to put the heat on you. I didn't give a damn, and I got some other guy to cut it for me. Everybody donated their talents, and when I put it up for the Academy Award, for the first screening with a group we have which picks out a certain number of films out of this avalanche of films, it tore them up. They fell down laughing, and it went into the second group. The second group pares it down into three pictures. It was mysteriously withdrawn, because they all came to me and said how everybody laughed at this thing, just made them scream. Somehow, it didn't get into the finals, and I figured it was an embarrassment to the Academy.]