Grim Natwick was truly one of the great animators who ever lived. He created the character of Betty Boop, probably the only female animated cartoon character to achieve world-wide popularity. When he came to Disney’s for the sole purpose of helping to animate the lead character in the world’s first feature cartoon, he was well over twice the age of most of his colleagues, and left the studio after Snow White, joining his former boss Max Fleischer for his first feature Gulliver’s Travels. He later worked for UPA Studios. His work on the character of Snow White, however, will always remain the highlight of his long career and one of the cornerstones of that films’s greatness and lasting power for more than sixty years. This was hard won, through over eight years of art school training, three of which were in Vienna. He also contributed one of the film’s most enduring characters: the turtle who is used as a washboard and who seems never to be in the right place at the right time. When I interviewed Grim in early 1988, he was a bright-eyed ninety-seven years young. Although he had nearly total recall, some of his sentences tended to ramble. I have kept most of our interview intact, however, and hope that, although extended (perhaps too much so for some), reading it in its entirety will reward true lovers of animation with a wealth of material never before published and not found elsewhere.
[…]
