Motion Picture Animator. He won his place in cartoon history as the creator of Betty Boop. Born Myron Natwick in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, he studied at the Chicago Art Institute and began his career as a commercial illustrator. He was nicknamed "Grim" for his somber work habits and kept it as his professional moniker for the rest of his life. Moving to New York in 1916, he was drawn into the budding animation field by a former schoolmate, Gregory LaCava, who was in charge of Hearst's International Film Service studio. "He persuaded me to try it for a couple of weeks", Natwick recalled. "That lasted about fifty years. I was what they call a natural animator, and I don't know why". Among the series he worked on were "Krazy Kat", "Happy Hooligan", and "Bringing Up Father". When the Hearst Studio closed in 1918 Natwick took three years off for further study in Vienna, and joined the Fleischer studio at the beginning of the talkie era. He was one of the few animators of his time with extensive art training and this made him a go-to guy for characters and situations that needed to be rendered realistically. In 1930, director Dave Fleischer asked Natwick for a caricature of "boop-oop-a-doop" singer Helen Kane to serve as romantic interest for their character Bimbo, and Betty Boop made her debut in the short "Dizzy Dishes". In Natwick's original design Betty was a hybrid of dog and human, with canine ears and nose atop a convincingly sexy woman's body, but audience response to her was strong and immediate. (Soon she would be modified into a fully human figure, with a button nose and hoop earrings replacing the dog ears). Natwick animated Betty Boop in only four films before leaving the Fleischer studio and never saw a dime from the millions in publishing and merchandising profits the character generated over the decades. From 1931 to 1936 he was supervising animator and director for Ub Iwerks in Los Angeles and was a key artist on Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), in which he was chiefly responsible for animating Snow White. He returned to Fleischer for their feature "Gulliver's Travels" (1939). During the 1940s Natwick worked on Walter Lantz's "Woody Woodpecker" cartoons and from 1950 to 1959 he was employed at UPA, where his credits included John Hubley's Oscar-nominated short "Rooty-Toot-Toot" (1952) and the "Mr. Magoo" series. At age 87 he was still at it, animating on Richard Williams' feature "Raggedy Ann and Andy" (1977), and only deteriorating eyesight forced him into retirement. In 1990, a celebration of Natwick's 100th birthday was attended by over 400 animators from around the world, who came to pay tribute to a legend in their field. He died seven weeks later. He was the cousin of actress Mildred Natwick.