#CATOON ARTIST BETTY BOOP ORIGINAL MOVIE#

“I knew for her to do the dancing and other things she had to do, her legs were important,” he says of his decision to keep the hemline high. Drawing on the influence of other “pretty girl” illustrators such as Charles Dana Gibson, Natwick carried the curly motif into Betty’s long eyelashes and famously short skirt. Betty’s ripe physique was modeled on Mae West. Kane was a popular singer of the time, noted for her signature vocal riff, “Boop-oop-a-doop.” Both her vocal style and her curly hair found their way into the animated Betty. “The curls are from Helen Kane,” Natwick says of Betty’s famous hairstyle. (Lantz, who started out at the Hearst studio with Natwick, later set up his own studio and employed Natwick to work on such characters as Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy.) So in 1929–by which time Natwick had moved to the better-paid employ of cartoon producers Max and Dave Fleischer–it was only natural that Natwick would be asked to design a new girl character named Betty Boop. “He could draw pretty women better than anyone I knew,” the animator Walter Lantz once told an interviewer. In particular, Natwick gained a reputation for his female characters. “I deliberately would sometimes draw a side view or a back view just to know what was there,” he says. For instance, when depicting characters dancing together, most cartoonists stuck with a profile view Natwick made his characters turn around while they danced. “I was doing things that the other animators had not dared to do,” Natwick says. Unlike most people in the field, Natwick had real art training, including several crucial years of anatomy drawing. I figured people would still be publishing songs if I didn’t like it.”īringing to the screen such Hearst newspaper comic characters as Krazy Kat, the Katzenjammer Kids, and Happy Hooligan, Natwick immediately demonstrated impressive technical skill as well as a flair for comic characterization. I said all right, I’ll try it for one month. “La Cava said he’d pay me 40 bucks a week. “He was in charge of an animation studio that William Randolph Hearst had set up,” Natwick remembers. The UnGala is back! Clic k here for the ticket link for this year's celebration at Epiphany Center for the Arts on Oct. In the years before World War I, Chicago was an important music-publishing center, and Natwick earned a decent living creating the cover pictures for popular songs–including, he says, the first six published songs by blues master W.C. Born and bred in a small Wisconsin town, he was trained as a serious artist–he studied at the School of the Art Institute–and was already established as an illustrator of sheet music while still in college. “We’d fill our wastebaskets with ’em.” Now, production cels are pricey items at Circle Gallery, which last week hosted a 99th birthday party for Natwick to launch its new exhibit, “The Art of Animation.”Īs Natwick recalls it, he wasn’t particularly interested in cartoon animation to begin with. “We used to throw these things away,” he says of the production cels used to create film cartoons. Today, cartoon illustration has been elevated to the status of collectible art–and no one’s more surprised than Natwick. At age 99, he has seen the art and business of film animation go through many ups and downs: from the quickie throwaway black-and-white cartoons of the silent era and the early days of sound to the elaborate full-color features of Hollywood’s “golden age” to the cheaper “limited animation” style of the television years. Magoo–the list goes on and on.Īs one of the top animation artists of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Natwick brought to life some of the most durable characters in cartoons. Betty Boop, Snow White, Mickey Mouse, Krazy Kat, Clarabell Cow, Woody Woodpecker, Mr.

#CATOON ARTIST BETTY BOOP ORIGINAL MOVIE#

But in his day, Grim Natwick helped create some of the greatest stars in movie history. He’s retired now and living in Chillicothe, Missouri. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.

Catoon artist betty boop original