In his Bronx animation studio, Paul Terry was furious. He did not want to spend a dime more than he had to. Christmas was coming, and Terry was already preparing his Christmas bonuses: bags of oranges from his personal grove. However, each time his star animator, Bill Tytla, came to him with the prospect of leaving him for Disney, Terry was obligated to increase his salary. Tytla’s salary at Terrytoons far outstripped the $100 a week that Ben Sharpsteen was offering, even at Art Babbitt’s personal recommendation.1 Terry didn’t understand the appeal of working for less at Disney or the appeal of pencil tests. He told Tytla, “When I hire a man to animate, I want him to know how.”2
In December 1933 Babbitt laid it on the line for Tytla. “Remember this one thing,” he wrote to his friend, “Disney is progressing a damn sight faster than Terry ever will and where it takes six or seven years to develop a man at Terry’s—the same man can develop the same amount here in one year. . . . This doesn’t mean that your ability is any the lesser but the longer you wait the more time it will take to catch up with the fellows here who are constantly progressing.”3
Indeed, Babbitt was progressing himself, and he was getting recognized for it. On January 29, 1934,4 Roy Disney called Babbitt into his office, tore up his $100-per-week contract, and handed him a new contract at $125 a week5—with another raise when the option would be renewed. Babbitt was overjoyed.6
“Ben [Sharpsteen] told me that Walt is hot for you,” Babbitt wrote Tytla in February, “so if you’re still interested I think (I’m positive) you can get $150 to start. If that sounds good and if the weather there has frozen your nuts plenty then write me—and say that ‘If I could start at $150 at least then I’d make the move.’ I know you’ll get it.”7
He added that he recently saw a Terrytoons cartoon, and it “seemed to me like some disconnected rantings of a half-wit just tied together by main and end titles. I was ashamed to think that I once considered that crap pretty good.”8
Babbitt was not bluffing about Disney’s hiring spree. New employees were coming in all the time, and additions to the studio space were being constructed every few months. Work started on the large new animation building directly behind the main building. In March 1934 Walt called his entire 110-person staff to the front lawn for a photo-op with their new Disney-licensed Post Toasties cereal. Babbitt posed behind Fred Moore, and as the shutter prepared to snap, Babbitt, straight-faced, tickled Fred’s ear.
On March 16, 1934, Walt Disney sat in the Fiesta Room of Hollywood’s Ambassador Hotel, dressed in his finest, surrounded by movie stars. It was the sixth annual Academy Awards ceremony, and he was there to receive the gold statuette for Three Little Pigs. Walt, as the producer (and the only credit on screen), graciously accepted the award. The cartoon’s director, Burt Gillett, left the company later that month for the Van Beuren studio.9 Production manager Ben Sharpsteen would step up to fill the vacant director spot as soon as he finished supervising trainees on a new Silly Symphony called The Wise Little Hen.
The humor for this cartoon mainly came from the funny new voices, much like Dippy Dawg had emerged from Pinto Colvig’s “hick” voice. For this new short, the studio had hired Florence Gill, an actress and opera soprano who could impersonate a singing chicken. A new voice actor named Clarence Nash voiced a swine in a sweater named Peter Pig and a waterfowl in a sailor shirt named Donald Duck (his first appearance).
Wilfred Jackson directed the short. Sharpsteen supervised the hen animation done by a trainee named Woolie Reitherman, who had graduated from art school the previous year. Babbitt animated scenes of Peter Pig and Donald Duck doing their funny dances and then faking bellyaches.10
The studio staff found the Duck hilarious. Even before The Wise Little Hen premiered, the Duck was already cast against Mickey Mouse in Orphan’s Benefit. Now the Duck’s temper and ego were crystallized. Animator Dick Lundy invented the signature choreography for Donald when he got hopping mad, swinging his fist back and forth. (The cartoon also marked the renaming of Dippy Dawg as “Goofy.”)
However, it was Norm Ferguson who shook the studio that spring. Ever since the print for Playful Pluto came back, the staff had been studying his sequence. He animated Pluto wrestling with a piece of flypaper, and the audience could follow not only Pluto’s actions but also his thought process. Pluto, annoyed and puzzled, acted entirely in pantomime. It was brilliant. Ferguson had tapped into the wellspring of personality animation.
Babbitt had a piece of animation that was scrutinized too. Unfortunately, it was hailed as an example of what not to do.
The fellows were cracking up at Babbitt’s old man in The China Shop. Babbitt’s scene had become a “laughing lesson” in poor planning, repeatedly shown to the animators as an example of how to tackle an assignment completely the wrong way. “I think he used half the footage of the picture trying to get out through the door!” an animator remarked.11 Though it could be considered a layout error, Babbitt was mocked for it more than either the director or the layout man.12
Babbitt was a perfectionist, so this flawed scene from The China Shop rankled him. No doubt he wished he could laugh at his own mistake as well.
By mid-1934, Hollywood was abuzz about a new acting technique from Russian theater artists Konstantin Stanislavski and his student, Richard Boleslawski. Known as method acting, it instructed actors in using their personal experiences to elicit authentic performances. Babbitt eagerly bought two books on the subject.13
Hollywood was continuing to influence animation in other ways as well. Like other comedy trios (the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers), the Disney studio would team up Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. The trio would be pitted against Peg-Leg Pete, portrayed as a mobster with a Russian accent.
It was after hours at the Disney lot, and the sky was draped in sunset colors over the neon Mickey Mouse sign. Thirty-two-year-old Walt Disney waited alone in the studio soundstage.
One by one the artists returned from dinner. Animators and story men found the soundstage filled with seats, and they sat down. Walt stood alone at the front. This time he wasn’t pitching story ideas for a short cartoon. He was selling the enchantment that he himself had experienced in 1917 as a boy in Kansas City.
He told them that they were going to start work on the world’s first feature-length animated cartoon, a retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Snow White.” Walt began acting out the movie, entirely by himself. His artists sat spellbound for hours. When Walt finished, every artist was all in. Preproduction would start immediately.14
The art classes would have to be ramped up. Don Graham would increase his teaching schedule to three days a week, critiquing rough animation in sweatbox sessions and leading day and night classes. Two more art instructors would be hired to fill out the five-day class schedule.15 The engine was accelerating.
On August 7 an outline for the new Mouse-Duck-Goof cartoon, called Mickey’s Service Station, appeared on the bulletin boards. Unsurprisingly, it included a memo requesting gag ideas, although exclusively centered around personality. “There is a chance of working in personality gags and situations around the Goof and the Duck, who help Mickey run his small, rural garage, in which every type of well-known service is performed by them in an exaggerated comedy manner,” it read.
But the outline didn’t actually leave room for personality. In fact, it was typical of all the cartoons up to that point, packed with slapstick, action, and puns, ending with a high-speed chase. The outline concluded, “Kindly draw up gags and have them ready by noon on Wednesday August 16, 1934.”16
Babbitt did not submit any gags; he had already left on vacation August 11, having gone to New York City through the extravagance of commercial air travel.17 He met up with his Disney friends Les Clark, Dick Lundy, and Frank Churchill (who had traveled to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago); boarded a steamship with them on August 17; and sailed through the Panama Canal to dock in Los Angeles on September 3.18
When he returned, Babbitt began animating on Two-Gun Mickey. He was assigned nearly all of the cartoon’s Peg-Leg Pete scenes—he had risen to animating the studio’s key villain. In a 1934 publicity shoot for another cartoon, Peculiar Penguins, Walt posed for several photos with different groupings of creative staff: directors, story men, and lead animators. Babbitt was included in all of them.19
As a lead animator, Babbitt was now privy to story meetings. He sat among the brain trust of Walt and the directors as they dissected plot points. Push-pinned across several large corkboards like an endless comic strip were five hundred storyboard drawings illustrating Mickey’s Service Station. A single panel showed the Goof sitting atop a hollow tube, his arm reaching down through one hole and coming up out of the hole behind him.20
Babbitt saw much potential in this little bit of business. He begged Walt for this scene of the Goof, but Walt had Babbitt scheduled for Peg-Leg Pete’s scenes. Walt relented under the condition that Babbitt complete his Pete scenes first.
On Babbitt’s exposure sheet, director Ben Sharpsteen had timed the Goof scene to be 4.16 seconds long.21 Babbitt considered the scene not as simple slapstick, but as dimwitted character’s attempt to solve a problem. Watching stupid behavior wasn’t nearly as interesting as watching someone carefully calculate and still do the task completely wrong—just as Babbitt had on The China Shop.
Similar to Fergie’s animation of the Big Bad Wolf and of Pluto, Babbitt attempted to indicate the Goof’s thought process. Doing so would require adding drawings and run time, known disparagingly as “padding” a scene. But in a manner similar to what Stanislavski taught, Babbitt attempted to identify with his character. It wasn’t a matter of imitating life but of caricature—of pushing the edges of what he knew.22
By the time he finished animating the scene, the final version had swelled to a whopping thirty-six seconds. Babbitt had exceeded the scene’s allotment tremendously without once checking with the director. The incident made him rather unpopular among the story staff.23
The scene was cut into the final reel and sweatboxed for Walt. Not only was it funny, but it endowed the Goof with true personality, like a comic actor with a mind and soul. Babbitt may have been insubordinate to the director, but Walt liked the work, and that was that.
From Ye Olden Days to Mickey’s Service Station, Babbitt saw untapped potential in the Goof. The China Shop incident was still fresh, and he began to recall others he had known who possessed either the optimism he admired or mental limitations he could laugh at:
Joe, the leg-crossing narcoleptic horse.
Bumpkins from Sioux City, like the butcher who couldn’t see his buggy dangling right above him.
His Italian barber in New York and his backward witticisms.
John Terry at Terrytoons, who laughed off tuberculosis with, “Every day is gravy.”
His father, a religious man whose faith in the supernatural kept him going.
Taking a page out of Stanislavski’s method, Babbitt began doing something that no animator had ever considered: psychoanalyzing his character. He began to write.
Babbitt described the Goof “as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan,” and, “a hick. . . . He can move fast if he has to, but he would rather avoid any over-exertion, so he takes what seems the easiest way. He is a philosopher of the barbershop variety. No matter what happens, he accepts it finally as being for the best, or at least, amusing. . . . He is very courteous and apologetic and his faux pas embarrass him, but he tries to laugh off his errors. . . . He is in close contact with sprites, goblins, fairies and other such fantasia. . . . The improbable becomes real where the Goof is concerned.”
Babbitt assembled his summary into a two-and-a-half-page typed treatise. He called it “Character Analysis of the Goof” and distributed it throughout the studio.24
It was immediately hailed as the studio’s latest breakthrough, and the long-sought key to personality animation.