Babbitt was born to a Jewish family[1] in the Little Bohemia section of Omaha, Nebraska, but moved to Sioux City, Iowa after he finished kindergarten.
After graduating from Sioux City Central High in 1924 at the age of 16, Art decided to move to New York to take on the role of breadwinner after his hard-working father had an accident on duty and became paralyzed as a result.
But in the early 1930s he moved to Los Angeles followed by his fellow Terrytoon colleague Bill Tytla, and secured a job animating for the Walt Disney Studio, which was expanding at the time.
[3] Of all Disney's films, Pinocchio was the feature which Babbitt most admired, and which he regarded as the finest achievement of the studio during the "Golden Age" of animation.
He thought long and carefully before he did anything, and then he did it wrong.He had previously expounded on Goofy’s nature in a 1930s memo: Think of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a half-wit, a shiftless, good-natured colored boy and a hick.
[2]During the 1930s Babbitt rose to become one of Disney's best-paid artists, and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle despite the austerity of the Great Depression: I was living the Life of Riley.
Most of the strikers were in-betweeners, cel painters, and other less-well paid employees, who in 1941 began industrial action in pursuit of better working conditions.
Babbitt was fired more than once but was reinstated, taking his case successfully all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and winning a handsome settlement.
He worked on many of their famous award-winning shorts, including the lead character Frankie in "Rooty Toot-Toot" (1951), and won many awards.
[5] In the 1950s he was part owner of Quartet Films, where he worked on television commercials, including the Cleo winning "John & Marsha" spot for Parkay Margarine.
Some of Babbitt's final work was on the characters King Nod and Phido, the vulture, in Williams' film The Thief and the Cobbler.
In the late 1980s, a British television documentary titled Animating Art was broadcast, celebrating Babbitt's life and work.