Art Babbitt

Arthur Harold Babitsky (October 8, 1907 – March 4, 1992), better known as Art Babbitt, was an American animator, best known for his work at the Walt Disney Productions animation unit. He received over 80 awards as an animation director and animator, and also developed the character of Goofy. Babbitt worked as an animator or animation director on films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo, among others. Outside of Disney, he also animated The Wise Quacking Duck for Leon Schlesinger Productions.

Babbitt was born to a Jewish family in the Little Bohemia section of Omaha, Nebraska, but moved to Sioux City, Iowa after he finished kindergarten. After graduating from Sioux City Central High in 1924 at the age of 16, Art decided to move to New York to take on the role of breadwinner after his hard-working father had an accident on duty and became paralyzed as a result.

Art Babbitt began his career in New York City working for Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio. But in the early 1930s he moved to Los Angeles followed by his fellow Terrytoon colleague Bill Tytla, and secured a job animating for the Walt Disney Studio, which was expanding at the time.

Babbitt began his career at Disney as an assistant animator, but his talent was spotted and he was soon promoted to animator. His first important work was a drunken mouse in the short The Country Cousin (1936), which won an Academy Award for the studio.

At the Disney Studio, Babbitt animated the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a job described by Disney animator Andreas Deja as "one of the toughest assignments" on the film. While he was working on Snow White, he met his first wife, Marjorie Belcher, a dance model whose live-action performance was used as reference material by the animators for the role of Snow White.

On the film Pinocchio, Babbitt animated the character of Geppetto, and became a directing animator. Of all Disney's films, Pinocchio was the feature which Babbitt most admired, and which he regarded as the finest achievement of the studio during the "Golden Age" of animation. Babbitt also animated the characters of the Dancing Mushrooms, Dancing Thistles, Dancing Orchids, Zeus, Vulcan, and Boreas in Fantasia. On the feature film Dumbo, Babbitt was again made a directing animator, and animated the character of the stork. When animating the stork, he made him resemble his voice actor, Sterling Holloway. Babbitt is also credited with developing the character of Goofy, a character which he later described in the 1987 documentary film Animating Art:

Goofy was someone who never really knew how stupid he was. He thought long and carefully before he did anything, and then he did it wrong.

He had previously expounded on Goofy’s nature in a 1930s memo: