A Master Animator's Masterwork
Plus: animation news.
Welcome back! Another Sunday, another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate:
1️⃣ Inside Art Babbitt’s “best piece of animation.”
2️⃣ Global animation newsbits.
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With that out of the way, here we go!
1 – Animating a bear
Art Babbitt (1907–1992) was one of the most important animators of the 20th century. He was a Disney ace — and the artist who developed Goofy into the character we know. Later in his career, he worked on Richard Williams’ Thief and the Cobbler.
From a technical standpoint, Babbitt was hard to match. “In the first Disney feature [Snow White] he animated the Queen where she was beautiful, up to the point where she is transformed into the hag,” Williams once explained. “In Pinocchio he did most of the animation of Geppetto, and Geppetto almost looks like him.”1
His track record was exceptional. And yet Babbitt himself felt that his single greatest bit of work wasn’t for Disney, or even for Williams. He drew it for UPA — a studio often ignored in discussions around animation technique.
As researcher Stephen Worth wrote in 2006, in a now-vanished blog post:
I once asked Art what he thought his best piece of animation was, expecting him to cite Goofy in Moving Day … or Geppetto in Pinocchio. But Art surprised me. He stated without equivocation that his animation of the bear chasing the dandelion in UPA’s Grizzly Golfer was his best.2
Grizzly Golfer, released in 1951, was among the first Mr. Magoo cartoons. Magoo was UPA’s big character — and a two-time Oscar winner. He helped to define the ‘50s. Even so, Grizzly Golfer isn’t Magoo’s most exciting film. Others had fresher jokes, or richer graphic experiments, or more pointed social satire. It’s no Pink and Blue Blues.
But it still gave us something beautiful: Babbitt’s bear ballet.
Internal documents from UPA label this moment as “scene 16” and give it the terse description, “Bear chases dand slow motion.”3 It happens around four-and-a-half minutes into Grizzly Golfer. Babbitt, also behind several earlier shots in the film, was in charge.
Scene 16 portrays a bear’s attempt to eat a floating dandelion. In his pursuit, he goes through an intricate series of motions — something like a dance. “Art told me that he choreographed the scene as a ballet, planning each movement out in detail,” Worth recalled. “He saw the character as a performer.”
Babbitt drew the whole section “straight through,” according to Worth. He completed it on paper as a single, flowing performance. A cut to a close shot was added in the final film, but the camera operator created it simply by zooming into Babbitt’s work.
Many years ago, Worth got his hands on most of Babbitt’s original animation drawings for this scene. He turned them into a makeshift pencil test back in 2006. It’s a showcase of powerful, physical motion — all emerging from pencil lines. See it below:
To quote Worth again, “Babbitt’s animation skillfully contrasts weight and weightlessness as the bear gracefully falls under the spell of the wayward dandelion.” It’s a good summary of a striking clip. Babbitt was working in the pared-down UPA design style, but he infused this scene with fluidity and anatomy that feel weirdly realistic.
Still, one of the most striking things about this pencil test is what it fails to show. As impressive as it is, it doesn’t show the bear’s animation as it really looks in Grizzly Golfer. The pencil version and the final animation feel little alike.
Compared to Worth’s video, the actual Grizzly Golfer scene has a clipped, stop-start quality. The bear pops around, freezes in place. It reads clearly as limited animation, the name for UPA’s anti-realistic approach to motion. The natural movement that Babbitt drew on paper is nowhere to be seen. Why did it turn out so differently?
The book Cartoon Modern characterizes UPA animation as “a rebellion against the fluid realism of Disney.”4 This is true, but what it means isn’t straightforward. At its most extreme, UPA-style animation gave us films like Fight on for Old, composed in large part of two-drawing loops. Babbitt didn’t go that far in Grizzly Golfer. He stood in between Disney and UPA, revealing something about both in the process.
Discussing scene 16 of Grizzly Golfer, the UPA historian Adam Abraham said:
Although Art Babbitt worked for UPA — known as it was for streamlined, so-called “limited” animation — he remained loyal to the tenets of rounded, Walt Disney animation. This pantomime evokes Disney cartoons of the 1930s, especially those in which the dog Pluto interacts with [the] realities and limitations of the physical world.5
Babbitt embraced Disney-like physicality in scene 16. He drew the action in a continuous, three-dimensional way. Worth’s video highlights that aspect of it.6 But Babbitt also rejected Disney’s sense of timing, and its obsession with constant movement. Instead, his animation came out looking like this:
At Disney, there was a belief that animation needed to stay in motion to stay alive. To hold a drawing still was to kill it. Disney animator Wilfred Jackson recalled how the studio’s cartoon Frolicking Fish (1930) stumbled upon:
... a fluid type of action where they didn’t hit a hold and move out of it. But when one part would hold something else would move. So there was never a complete stop. And this was a scene Walt made us all look at, because he said that is the worst thing about the kind of animation you guys are doing. Your character goes dead and it looks like a drawing.7
At UPA, this “death” happened by design in every film. The characters are drawings that move — their artificiality is front and center. Babbitt had long since mastered the art of constant motion, but it wasn’t the style at UPA. Here, he took a different approach.
In Worth’s video, Babbitt’s drawings have been arranged to run at a single rate, one after another. Playing his animation back in this way, without the stops, makes its Disney elements stand out. But the final version of scene 16 shows itself to be hold-driven animation, where Babbitt is in fact leading us from still pose to still pose.
The bear’s body pauses as his eyes move. Specific drawings and expressions freeze on screen long enough that they’re clear and distinct, flattening the character. At times, the bear stays so still for such an extended period that it resembles mime.
This style wasn’t uncommon at UPA. In a number of its cartoons, the animators drew fuller, more complete motions whose timing was broken up on purpose when filmed. Remove the holds and certain actions play back as fluid and continuous. Yet removing the holds also destroys the timing that the animators intended.
For example, see this moment from Rooty Toot Toot with and without two of the dramatic holds for effect. It becomes more fluid — showing that the animator drew a mostly unbroken motion on paper. But watching it without the stops and starts drains a lot of its power. It starts to feel busy, overacted:
UPA’s team could be as dogmatic about this approach as Walt Disney was about constant motion. Our favorite description of UPA’s animation style, which we’ve quoted many times, comes from artist Jules Engel. He said in the ‘70s:
… the best performance that you can get from [this] medium should be a kind of limited gestures. Because if the animator really looks for performance to the stage, the gestures there are truly limited. There isn’t a gesture on the stage that is not truly necessary. In other words, very seldom do you find a really great stage actor where he would use his hands or his head or any portion of his body, where he would make as much movement as the best animator made for Walt Disney. The animator at Walt Disney, or most of the animators, they are afraid to stop gesturing, because they are afraid that the damn character falls apart, because all of a sudden he becomes flat. By having the flat character and designing flat, like we did at UPA, we didn’t have to worry about that, and still our gestures, our “acting technique,” was the closest to what a great actor on the stage would be doing.
Limited animation often gets discussed in simplistic terms. You sometimes hear, for example, that Disney always animated “on ones” — 24 new drawings per second — and anything lower is “limited.” But that wasn’t the Disney standard (its classic films tend to be “on twos”), and UPA itself animated “on ones” where necessary. Babbitt did it for the first second of scene 16, before switching to twos.
In reality, limited animation isn’t a single formula. It’s multifaceted. The style is wholly unrealistic until it isn’t. It animates only one part of a character’s otherwise motionless body — until it doesn’t. There’s a wide gulf between Grizzly Golfer and Fight on for Old, but both are limited animation.
As a series of pencil drawings, Babbitt’s “best piece of animation” displays the technical skill he’d developed at Disney. With its proper timing added, it becomes something that expresses the UPA spirit. Adam Abraham noted that “this sequence was one of [Grizzly Golfer director] Pete Burness’s favorites in all his films.”
Given that Burness won Oscars with two later cartoons, that says a lot. It says even more that Babbitt thought so highly of this sequence.
Is it easy to disagree with Babbitt that he peaked in the early ‘50s? Sure. But what’s obvious, either way, is that scene 16 is worthy of serious study — both as an entryway into UPA’s theory of animation and as an achievement in itself.
This is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on October 13, 2022. It was exclusive to paying subscribers then — now, we’ve made it free to all.
2 – Newsbits
In America, Across the Spider-Verse swept the Annie Awards. Other winners included Kizazi Moto (for the episode Enkai), Nimona and Cartoon Saloon’s Screecher’s Reach. Find the full list here.
In Japan, there’s a gorgeous new ad for Ghibli Park. Hayao Miyazaki storyboarded it — Akihiko Yamashita (Invisible, The Boy and the Heron) was the director and key animator.
After a huge opening last weekend, the latest in China’s Boonie Bears series (Time Twist) has already made around $210 million in its home country. It’s being called the biggest-ever animated hit in the Spring Festival filmgoing season. At this rate, Time Twist may surpass all animated films but Ne Zha at the Chinese box office.
In England, The Boy and the Heron and the very good short Crab Day claimed the BAFTAs’ animation prizes today. (See Crab Day in full on YouTube.)
In America, Paramount announced the layoff of 800 employees with a disquieting corporate spiel about “unleashing the power of content around the world.”
Last month, the Mexican animated feature The Language of Birds wrapped a successful Kickstarter campaign. Talking to Milenio, the creators say their film should be done in 2025. It’s been underway (with film fund support) since 2020.
In South Korea, Bong Joon-ho of Parasite fame is gearing up for an animated feature. With a budget of 70 billion won (over $52 million), The Chosun Ilbo calls it Korea’s most expensive animated movie to date.
The German researcher and gallery owner Stefan Riekeles, who specializes in anime background art, shared a mesmerizing little peek behind the magic of Akira.
El Fauno, a Costa Rican film fund, is offering a sizable amount of money to project pitches for animated series and shorts.
Lastly, we interviewed the director and art director of Moremi — adapted from a Nigerian story, produced in South Africa and bankrolled by Disney.
See you again soon!
From Williams’ article Character Analysis of the Animator — January 1974, published in Sight and Sound (Spring 1974).
From Stephen Worth’s blog post on Animation Resources in March 2006, the source for his quotes today. It’s an archive link — which may be broken in email, but works fine on our website. A post from ASIFA-Hollywood was a useful source on Babbitt’s career, too.
Researcher Devon Baxter published these UPA documents on Cartoon Research back in 2016.
See Cartoon Modern, page 146.
From Adam Abraham’s audio commentary track for Grizzly Golfer, as heard in Mr. Magoo: The Theatrical Collection 1949–1959.
The Disney influence on the bear in Grizzly Golfer was so obvious that it alienated some critics. Sight and Sound (July–September 1953) described the bear as “curiously unconvincing” — and as a “Disney-esque characterization,” which wasn’t a compliment coming from Sight and Sound back then.
As recounted in The Illusion of Life, in the section on Norm “Fergy” Ferguson.
This is just an outstanding analysis – thank you!
I’m a big fan of UPA & indeed it’s European cousin, Zagreb Studios, but for me it’s not so much about “limited” animation as it is about economy.
“Limited” is a somewhat pejorative term in animation circles where there is a fear that you’re not working hard enough when in fact the forced economies imposed by TV budgets & schedules or simply a lack of money resulted in a very pared down and economic style of narrative that emphasised strong design and an inventive approach.