Whether conscious of it or not, Babbitt was blazing new territory as an instructor of a previously uninstructed craft.  He brought a briefcase of original teaching material every day to class and used his own illustrations for his lectures.  “Arthur assigned animation tests every week, then the next week there would be a critique of these ‘loops,’ of film on the 16 mm projector,” recalls Carl Bell.  “The first thing we learned was breaking the joint, a solid box falling over, overlapping action.  That was his basic start.  And then it was all just stick figures, because you could tell everything about weight and follow-through in storytelling drawings just with a stick figure. But once you got that going, then it was assigning the model sheet.  You had to stick to the model.  The animation became a little more lively each class.”[21]

Today, Carl has served 18 years as a Governor for the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he has animated for Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow, Ralph Bakshi, and was at Walt Disney Feature Animation during its renaissance.  Like his friendship with Richard Williams, Bell valued his notes from Babbitt’s class -- but there was a fellow student whose notes were even better.  “Ruth ‘Casey’ Kissane had done much neater, structured notes,” says Bell.  “Every page was beautiful, because she was a designer.  So rather than send Dick Williams my rough notes over in England, I sent Ruth Kissane’s.  And I think that’s the point at which Dick got interested in having Arthur come over and teach his employees at his Soho studios.”

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Richard Williams was making some of London’s finest animation when he first made contact with Babbitt via the telephone in 1973.  His studio was working on a commercial for a New York company.  As he describes it,

"We didn’t make any money on it, either, and the only good thing that came out of it was the producer woman said, 'Oh, you must meet Art Babbitt, I work with him all the time on commercials,' …  Anyway, she got him on the phone and we met and he had seen some of our work and he said, 'Well, you don’t know what you’re doing, obviously, but you’re doing an honest job.'  And I said, “Well, how would you like to come in and show us so we know what we’re doing.  I mean, teach us please.”[22]

For four weeks from July 2 to July 26, Babbitt, at Williams’ expense, gave daily lectures to the artists at the London studio.  “He revealed the Hollywood secrets of animation with outstanding clarity and precision,” wrote Williams.  “This was like water in the desert for us. … He had, in his own words, ‘the low blood pressure of a teacher,’ and his patience was extraordinary, balanced with a crusty ‘don’t think you know it all, kid.’” [23]

Babbitt with the hand-crafted certificate from the Richard Williams Studio, summer 1973.

Richard Williams’ pencil was furiously at work to capture a shorthand of Babbitt’s words.  According to animator Tom Sito, these pages of notes “have been xeroxed and rexeroxed and passed from hand to hand and have become the most widely read unpublished samizdat how-to book in animation history.  I don't know an animator from the 70's who doesn't have a copy somewhere.”[24]

But Babbitt was not just preaching the mechanics of “full animation.”  As a living piece of the Golden Age, he was an embodiment of the ideals of that time.  In 1936 he had lectured to the Disney staff: “We want to raise animation above the level of a trick – a novelty – a filler on a double feature bill.  We want to create genuine, substantial, understandable, rich artistic entertainment.”[25]  Now, in the age of poorly-made Saturday morning tripe, he was bringing back the dignity of the medium.  “An animator must possess a curiosity about everything that exists or moves,” he was now saying.  “He should be well read… he must be acquainted with music … he must have traveled … he must inhabit the theater … he should attend the ballet … he should absorb the artistry of great pantomimists… he should study motion pictures … he must possess at least a cursory knowledge and an appreciation of all kinds of art.”[26]