Honoring 2 Enduring Stars of Celluloid : Animation: A reception will be held in Anaheim for Grim Natwick, who turns 100 this year, and his creation, Betty Boop, who is 60 years old. Neither betray their ages.

LOS ANGELES —  Betty Boop wasn’t intended to be a star, and Grim Natwick, who created her, didn’t plan to be an animator, but that’s what happened. The Circle Gallery in the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where Natwick’s work will be on display through April 15, will have a reception Sunday afternoon at 2 in honor of a milestone year for these two luminaries: Betty made her debut in the Fleischer cartoon “Dizzy Dishes” 60 years ago; Natwick, one of the undisputed masters of the animator’s art, will celebrate his 100th birthday in August.

Natwick talked about his long career earlier this week at his West Los Angeles apartment.

The profession of animator did not exist when he was growing up in Wisconsin at the turn of the century, he said. He was in high school when J. Stuart Blackton drew “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”--generally regarded as the first animated film--in 1906.

Like many young artists at the time, Natwick wanted to enter the lucrative field of magazine and sheet-music cover illustration. He studied drawing and painting in Chicago and New York. After a brief stint as an animator at Hearst International Film Service in the early ‘20s, he left to study art at the Vienna National Academy.

When he returned to the United States in 1928, the by then-burgeoning animation industry needed trained artists. Natwick went to work for Max and Dave Fleischer, who were looking for a series to replace their silent “Song Cartunes” in which the famous Bouncing Ball followed the lyrics to popular favorites for the audience to sing along.

“One morning, Dave came over to my desk, handed me the music to the song ‘Boop-Boop-A-Doop’ by Helen Kane and asked me to design a girl character to go with it,” Natwick recalled. “At that point, the only character the Fleischers had in their sound cartoons was little dog named Bimbo. Without bothering to ask if they wanted a human, I started drawing a little girl dog.”

Natwick drew a modified dog’s head on a curvaceous girl’s body and gave her a hairdo based on Kane’s spit curls. She was only a secondary character in “Dizzy Dishes,” singing “Boop-Boop-A-Doop” while Bimbo, an inept waiter, stumbled around the nightclub. But Betty was an instant hit, and Paramount, which distributed the Fleischer films, called for more cartoons “with that girl in them.”

Betty’s initial design was awkward. Natwick refined the character over the next year, making her fully human. Her floppy ears became bangle earrings; her black nose shrank to a retrousse button. But what set Betty apart from the outset was the way she moved. Previous female characters had been little more than males with long eyelashes and high heels: Natwick’s polished draftsmanship and knowledge of anatomy enabled him to give her a convincing feminine grace.

“Eight years of art school and night classes, drawing what must have been thousands of naked models, had taught me a little bit about the female body,” he said. “I knew all the sexy angles and shapes, from the turn of the ankle to the shape of the heel of her shoe to where her waist belonged.”

At least four actresses provided Betty’s childish giggle during her first year. Mae Questel took the role in 1931 for “Betty Co-Ed” and continued through the end of the series in 1939. (She reprised the role 58 years later for the Touchstone/Amblin comedy “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”)

Natwick said his animation of Betty led to job offers from “every cartoon studio in Hollywood.” He came to Los Angeles in 1931 to work for Walt Disney’s former partner, Ub Iwerks. One of the assistants at the studio was a 19-year-old art school graduate named Charles M. Jones, who went on to create Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

“I thought Grim was the oldest man in world then--he was all of about 42,” Jones said with a characteristic chuckle. “I did some assistant work for him, and my lines were sort of sloppy and droopy lines--the movement worked, but the lines weren’t crisp. Grim took me across the street, bought me an ice cream soda and showed me the difference between a curved line and straight line.

“Grim was always a great respecter of the single line, which is the syntax of drawing,” Jones continued, growing more serious. “All the finest drawings in the history of art, from the images on the walls of the caves at Lascaux to the work of Picasso, employ that single line. Because he was one of the few people in the animation business with a true fine-art background, Grim understood that an artist must be able to live by the single line.”

Iwerks’ studio soon foundered, and Natwick went to work for Disney. One of his first assignments was to animate the Princess in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The most realistic human character attempted in animation at that time, Snow White required an almost academic style of drawing. Marc Davis, one of the Nine Old Men of Disney and an exceptional draftsman in his own right, assisted Natwick.

“Grim was genuinely interested in art at a time when not too many men at the studio were,” Davis says. “His drawings gave Snow White a little more of a physical presence: The other animators were still primarily doing a cartoon type of thing, while Grim was moving ahead in giving his drawings a little more vitality.”

After completing “Snow White,” Natwick returned to the Fleischer Studio to animate Princess Glory, the heroine of their ill-fated adaptation of “Gulliver’s Travels.” Over the next three decades, he worked for Walter Lantz and UPA, made training films for the Army, and ran a free-lance commercial animation service with Tissa David. In 1968, he decided to quit animation and devote his time to painting, which he had abandoned 37 years before.

The retirement proved short-lived: In 1973, Richard Williams persuaded him to work on the Anglo-American feature “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy” and to teach animation to the younger artists. Disney animator Tom Sito, who began his career on the film, recalled: “I assisted Grim in 1976, when I was 18 and he was 86. His experience enabled him to distill the most complex motions into a few simple lines. His drawings moved beautifully, but they looked almost like shorthand, as if he couldn’t stand to use a single superfluous line.”

While working on “Raggedy Ann,” Natwick did his last animation: The Mad Holy Indian Witch in Williams’ long-awaited feature, “The Thief.” He then retired and returned to painting for the second time--just as Betty Boop was beginning to enjoy a resurgence in popularity.

Although he complains that his weakened eyesight has prevented him from painting for the last few years, and although he occasionally has trouble remembering a name, Natwick appears vigorously healthy. His conversation remains lively, and it’s easy to forget his age--until he matter-of-factly mentions that he remembers meeting William Randolph Hearst or voting for Woodrow Wilson. He enjoys the letters he gets from Betty Boop’s many fans.

When asked the secret of Betty’s enduring popularity, Natwick mentions a number of factors, ranging from her voice to her garter (inspired by a burlesque show) and her appeal to the increasingly independent women who grew up during the ‘30s. But finally, he concludes:

“Although she was never vulgar or obscene, Betty was a suggestion you could spell in three letters: S-E-X. She was all girl.”

New Betty Boop lithographs and serigraphs by Grim Natwick will be shown Sunday through April 15 at the Circle Gallery in the Disneyland Hotel, 1150 W. Cerritos Ave., Anaheim. Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. There will be a reception for Natwick Sunday at 2 p.m. Information: (714) 774-9979.