Disney 06 May 2009 07:40 am
Art Babbitt & Jack Kinney
I received another delightful note from Borge Ring. It concerns Art Babbit and Jack Kinney:
- Jack Kinney as a strategist
You mention Art Babbitt in your comment on Mike Barrier’s keen review of the Milt Kahl Celebration. Here is a Babbitt experience you may not have heard about.
Art was inducted into the Marines during the Second World War.
During his absence Disney had developed a brand new Goofy series written and directed by Jack Kinney and his brother Dick. These funny films starting with “How to Ride a Horse.” The CHAPLINESQUE animation was done by the much maligned Woolie Reitherman and the brilliant John Sibley. The familiar character of Goofy was drastically changed, His actionline was reversed to point up an optimistic chest instead of the hunched shoulders
Jack Kinney wrote:
”Art had won the courtcase with Disney. He came back to the studio and was assigned to work on my new Goofys. He demanded [a Goofy with] shoulders and five fingers, because otherwise he could not use the live action he always shot of Pinto Colvig, I gave him a whole Goofy to do as his very own “The Baggage Buster” That would keep him peaceful for awhile. And in the meantime I could make two, three or four Goofys without having him fuck them up”
writes
Børge
After a slightly strange “Baggage Buster” Jack Kinney (or whoever) relented and Babbitt animated some excellent “oldfashioned” Goofy sequences in the new series such as “Goofy’s Glider.”
Babbitt was a top “oarsman” onboard the good ship Hyperion and developed way up into Rooty Toot Toot. Art and Tissa David were John Hubley’s favourite animators. Hubley used to phone him from NY and beg: ‘”Thirty feet, Art. Juat thirty feet. ..please”
Copy of a copy of a copy.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
In 2006, I wrote about Art Babbitt’s work with Hubley on the Carousel feature here.
The beautiful horse, from How To Ride A Horse, comes from Jenny Lerew’s collection.
The Jack Kinney drawing is from the Disney Bulletin.
on 06 May 2009 at 11:03 am 1.Ignacio Carlos Ochoa said …
Michael, I am from Argentina , and someone told me that Art Babbitt came to Argentina at the beginning of the forty, to assess about animation for “Upa en Apuros”(The first argentinian color animated short).
You know something about this?
Here in my blog you will can find a post about “Upa en apuros”.
http://ignaciocarlosochoa.blogspot.com/2008/07/upa-en-apuros-upa-in-troubles.html
on 06 May 2009 at 11:38 am 2.richard o'connor said …
Haha. Even Hubley had to beg animators to do work.
on 06 May 2009 at 1:09 pm 3.Stephen Worth said …
When I worked with Art at FilmFair, I asked him about Baggage Buster, and he didn’t remember anything about it. (Or perhaps didn’t want to for some reason…) He said that he admired Reitherman’s animation of Goofy- in particular his scenes in Clock Cleaners. Art was very proud of his work on Goofy in Moving Day. He made a point of getting a copy of it on VHS and signing it to me. He was less satisfied with his UPA work, especially the shorts he directed. He said that those pictures didn’t play well with audiences. He considered them a mistake.
on 06 May 2009 at 1:18 pm 4.Thad said …
While BAGGAGE BUSTER is truly dreadful and I agree with Kinney’s sentiments about Babbitt’s animation not fitting in with the kind of Goofys he wanted to (and would) make, the chronology is wrong. That cartoon (and GOOFY’S GLIDER) was released before the strike.
on 06 May 2009 at 3:29 pm 5.Tim Hodge said …
Yeah, I saw Baggage Busters many years ago, and I was struck how un-Goofy it was. The five fingered hand really threw me off. Also, some of the acting seemed rotoscoped a la “Koko the Clown”.
I love all the other Kinney shorts, “How to Ride a Horse” being among my favorites. If I recall, it was originally released as part of “The Reluctant Dragon” feature. Robert Benchley stumbled into Ward Kimball’s & Freddie Moore’s office and watched the short on their movieola after Ward flipped a scene of Goofy dancing.
on 06 May 2009 at 7:01 pm 6.Jenny said …
Poor Art! So little love lost betwixt him and the post-strike Disney studio.
I’m sure he was gangbusters to be around(much less work with-or for)in his heyday, but he was such a charming, brilliant man to talk to in his retirement. And very generous.
on 07 May 2009 at 2:30 am 7.David said …
Jack Kinney’s remark about how Babbitt allegedly “demanded [a Goofy with] shoulders and five fingers, because otherwise he could not use the live action he always shot of Pinto Colvig” is puzzling because I don’t see evidence of that type of “rotoscoped” literalism in Babbitt’s previous work on Goofy (whether he shot live action reference of Pinto Colvig or not … ) Babbitt’s earlier Goof animation does not have the rotoscoped look of “Baggage Buster” (nor the five-fingers). So where did that come from ?
Kinney’s remarks also imply that the film was made as a time-waster to keep Babbitt occupied and out of his (Kinney’s) hair , so Babbitt was allowed to just go off into a corner to do whatever the hell he wanted .
That doesn’t seem plausible. But even so , is Art Babbitt the guy who gets the ultimate “blame” for Baggage Buster ? Someone approved the storyboard. Someone approved the rough animation and the clean-up (five fingers and all !) . That someone was director Jack Kinney. (unless Kinney is saying that Babbitt was the one who actually directed the picture when he says: ” I gave him a whole Goofy to do as his very own” )
on 07 May 2009 at 1:54 pm 8.Thad said …
David,
I don’t think it’s far-fetched to assume Babbitt had a lot of pull at the studio, pre-strike, when it came to things like how to animate certain characters. Compare BAGGAGE BUSTER (the most literal, unappealing Goofy ever drawn) to the contemporary THE ART OF SKIING (where every drawing is unique and funny). Night and day. There’s a passage in Barrier’s Animated Man that addresses how Walt was aware of how terrible Babbitt’s work in BAGGAGE is. Perhaps he’d lost his cartoony touch after his amazing job on the Queen in SNOW WHITE, and thought the syrupy junk he did for BAGGAGE was exaggerated.
Another funny story related to this that I heard from an old timer: in the 70s, Babbitt got ahold of a bunch of 16mm prints of the best 40s Kinney cartoons and pretty much spent one of his whole animation classes bitching about how shitty the animation of Goofy was in those. So there were hard feelings all around.
on 19 Aug 2015 at 8:36 pm 9.Bill Keeshen said …
My Grandfather, Ralph Wright, is considered the innovator in the Goofy shorts. He came up with the idea of trying again and again to humorous results. It may not seem innovative now, because the concept has been done over and over. Looney tunes ran with it with the Roadrunner cartoons, but it all started with Ralph the writer on the Goofy shorts.