Bartlett's first job, after graduating from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was at Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon, where he learned the art of stop-motion animation, working on movies such as The Adventures of Mark Twain.

Bartlett moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to animate the "Penny" claymations for the second season of Pee-wee's Playhouse on CBS.

[1] He later worked at BRC Imagination Arts, directing projects such as Postcards and Mystery Lodge for Knott's Berry Farm.

A dispute over a second planned Arnold movie resulted in Bartlett leaving Nickelodeon to write, direct and produce an animated TV movie for Cartoon Network called Party Wagon, a story originally intended as a pilot for an ongoing series.

In 2005 Bartlett returned to BRC to make a multimedia simulator attraction for NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, called the Shuttle Launch Experience.

One of these was four-time shuttle flier and commander and current NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. After developing various pilots and feature scripts, Bartlett moved to The Jim Henson Company, where he co-wrote the animated film Unstable Fables: 3 Pigs and a Baby.

Produced by Wind Dancer Films and his company, Snee-Oosh, Inc., the series premiered on PBS stations on February 15, 2016.