When Michael Barrier interviewed Kimball on December 12, 1986, it had been ten years since they had last sat down with a tape recorder between them. Ward was one of the first people in animation Michael interviewed, on Barrier’s first trip to Los Angeles in 1969, and they did another long interview in 1976. By 1986, Michael had talked with many people who crossed paths with Kimball, at the Disney studio and elsewhere, and he had accumulated a long list of statements he wanted to check with Ward. The 1986 interview was in that respect typical of many of Michael’s later interviews—not tell-me-about-your-career retrospectives, but much more focused.[…] The excerpts from the 1986 interview follow—the first excerpt quite typical, as Michael tested Kimball’s memories about Sleeping Beauty against those of Eyvind Earle, that film’s designer and background painter.
