Masters of Animation: Friz Freleng

Isadore Freleng was born in Kansas City in the year 1904. As it turned out, an early hub of animation was located in his hometown, and upon graduating high school in 1923, the young man people called Friz got a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. Another man who worked there, Walt Disney, had recently left to branch out on his own; his colleagues Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, and Bugs Hardaway were still around to train the young man, and Harman in particular took a great liking to Freleng. Friz had no real background in art, but he showed a seemingly innate ability for cartooning.

Both Iwerks and Harman eventually left Kansas City to join Disney, animating the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Alice Comedies series. On Harman’s recommendation, Disney hired Friz, who was assigned to work with Harman and Rudy Ising. In 1928, when Charles Mintz took the Oswald character away from Disney and hired away most of his staff, Harman and Ising took Friz with them. But when Carl Laemmle took Oswald away from Mintz and gave the character to Walter Lantz, everyone was out of work. Friz got a job with Columbia Pictures working on the Krazy Kat series, but Hugh Harman hadn’t forgotten his friend. In 1929, Leon Schlesinger was contracted to provide animated cartoons to Warner Bros; he contracted Harman-Ising Studios, and Freleng was one of their first hires. Friz Freleng found himself animating Looney Tunes starring Bosko; with Bosko in Dutch (1933), he began directing.

When Harman and Schlesinger had their falling out in 1933, Freleng was one of the animators (as were Bob Clampett and Bob McKimson) who stayed behind to join Schlesinger’s new, hastily-built outfit. Freleng stays in his capacity as animation director. Harman and Ising owned Bosko, so Schlesinger asked Freleng to create a new character: Buddy. Buddy was unpopular with audiences as well as the animators; he was nothing more than a thin rip-off of Bosko, who himself could be seen (and has by some) as a think rip-off of Mickey Mouse. Freleng also introduced the studio’s first major star, Porky Pig, in the short I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935), which also introduced the cat Beans and the dogs Ham and Ex (none of those characters hit with audiences). But Freleng preferred to work instead on musical shorts, and became the director of the Merrie Melodies instead. This way, Friz didn’t have to worry about character or plot; instead, he had to worry about music and gags, which seemed more fun to him anyway.

After directing Clean Pastures (1937), a religious burlesque that is one of the classic early Warner Bros cartoons, Freleng decided to leave Schlesinger to work at MGM for Fred Quimby’s animation department. There wasn’t a case of dissatisfaction with Schlesinger or his studio (although one can point to several examples of people quitting Schlesinger in the thirties); Quimby simply offered more money and artistic freedom. Said artistic freedom, however, turned out to be a carrot to lure Freleng; immediately, he was assigned to a new series called The Captain and the Kids, which was merely the umpteenth version of The Katzenjammer Kids. Freleng’s 15 MGM shorts are certainly not bad cartoons, however, and MGM did provide him with a sort of training ground that allowed him to improve his technique. In 1939 Friz returned to Schlesinger.

Freleng was undeniably one of the great Warner Bros directors. At least the Academy Awards started to think so; he was nominated for an Oscar in 1941 for his short Rhapsody in Rivets. Friz had continued to work on musical shorts and burlesques such as Pigs in a Polka (1943) for a while instead of working with characters. Not that Friz didn’t help to create some other classic Warner Bros characters. For example, in 1945 Friz directed Hare Trigger, which is the first real appearance of Yosemite Sam. The character had been used previously, but it was Friz who developed his personality and made him a great foil for Bugs (or is that the other way around?). The character is actually an homage to Freleng; the man himself was short, had a red moustache, and had a loud, explosive temper. Exaggerated to a certain degree, of course.

Also in 1945, Freleng created Sylvester the Cat. In his cartoon Life with Feathers, we are introduced to a cat that will do anything to catch and eat a bird. The character seemed destined as a one-off, but Friz had the idea to team Sylvester up with Tweety, a character Bob Clampett had created. Tweety was a likable character that the audience already seemed to love; Clampett wanted to keep using Tweety, but Tweety was funny because he was a reactive character; to be the star of a series, he had to be a proactive one, which would change the happy-go-lucky nature of the character too much. Clampett and Freleng plotted out a cartoon that paired Sylvester and Tweety called Tweetie Pie (1947). Friz directed the cartoon and won an Oscar.

One of his best shorts ever is Rhapsody Rabbit (1946). Animation historians agree that the cartoon was robbed of an Oscar through a series of unfortunate circumstances. It seems Technicolor accidentally delivered Rhapsody Rabbit to MGM, where William Hanna and Joseph Barbera screened it out of professional curiosity. The cartoon shows Bugs Bunny trying to play a piano at a concert, but his efforts are frustratingly hampered by a troublemaking mouse. By some sort of cosmic coincidence, Hanna and Barbera were working on a similar cartoon, The Cat Concerto (1947), with Tom in place of Bugs and Jerry in place of the mouse. Once they returned Rhapsody Rabbit to its proper owners, Hanna and Barbera rushed production of the admittedly brilliant Cat Concerto in an attempt to get it in theaters first and avoid charges of imitation. They didn’t manage to pull that off, but by another cosmic coincidence, both cartoons were eligible for Oscar nomination in the same year! And because the cartoons were screened in alphabetical order, it looked to the nominating committee as if Rhapsody Rabbit were ripping off The Cat Concerto! And so Rhapsody Rabbit lost the nomination, while The Cat Concerto went on to win the Oscar.

But Friz did win the Oscar the next year for Tweetie Pie. One of his best talents, it seems, was in fleshing out characters that other people created. His Bugs Bunny, for example, was more urbane and witty than in other cartoons. His Sylvester and Tweety cartoons are nearly all prime hilarity; much more so than when people would team Sylvester with Hippety Hopper or Sylvester Jr. Freleng also tried to flesh out Speedy Gonzales, a character created by Robert McKimson who seemed to be going nowhere. Freleng paired Speedy with Sylvester in Speedy Gonzales (1955) and won a second Oscar for his trouble. Freleng won another Academy Award for the Sylvester and Tweety short Birds Anonymous in 1957 and a fourth for the classic Knighty Knight Bugs in 1958.

Warners made the decision to close down its animation department in 1962. Friz Freleng was the only animator who had worked for Schlesinger (with one brief absence) since the Harman-Ising days of 1929. Friz and some other animators ended up working on animated segments for the Don Knotts film The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) under former Disney man Bill Tytla. Freleng did some designs and storyboards, but left before the animation began, ending up at Hanna-Barbera, where he directed some episodes of Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear. But Friz was soon contacted by David DePatie, a Warner Bros executive who had the idea of leasing some of the studio’s now-unused animation facilities to start a new animation company. Friz came aboard, and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises was born.

In 1963, DePatie-Freleng’s first contract was to provide an animated title sequence for Blake Edwards’s rather overrated film The Pink Panther. The titles (and Henry Mancini’s ultra-cool theme) were the best parts of the film; both aspects proved popular, and as a result United Artists/Mirisch contracted DePatie-Freleng for a Pink Panther series of theatrical shorts. The series began with Freleng’s The Pink Phink (1964), for which Freleng won a fifth Oscar. The series lasted until 1977, and then moved to television for ABC’s The All New Pink Panther Show which did, indeed, feature new animation…that was later released theatrically. The Pink Panther shorts were the last great theatrical short cartoons, and proof that visual (not verbal) gags could triumph. They are also, interestingly, the polar opposite of the cartoons Freleng did at Warners; not frenetic and zany, but understated and witty.

Ironically, it only took a few months for Warner Bros to realize that they had been premature in their decision to give up on animation; they ended up contracting DePatie-Freleng to create new Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. But in 1969, Warner Bros abandoned animated theatrical shorts entirely. DePatie-Freleng became a very successful company. Besides The Pink Panther, they produced eight other series of shorts: The Ant and the Aardvark (starting with the 1969 short The Ant and the Aardvark, the last theatrical short cartoon that Freleng ever directed), The Blue Racer, Crazylegs Crane, The Dogfather, Hoot Kloot, The Inspector, Roland and Rattfink, and Tijuana Toads. They produced the animated television series The Super 6, Super President, Here Comes the Grump, Doctor Dolittle, The Barkleys, The Houndcats, Bailey’s Comets, The Oddball Couple, Return to the Planet of the Apes, and Baggy Pants & the Nitwits. And there were many animated specials, most of them Dr. Seuss related, and three of which won Emmys. DePatie-Freleng also produced the television series Fantastic Four and Spider-Woman, and were five episodes into Spider-Man when David DePatie sold the company to Marvel Comics. Most of the staff and crew remained at the new Marvel Productions Ltd, who continued the show as Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

Friz had decided to move on. In 1979, Warner Bros released a compilation movie featuring 15 cartoons called The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie. Chuck Jones had directed new bridging material. It was enough of a success that Warners wanted to do it again, and Freleng was hired to create new material for Friz Freleng’s Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1980). He did the same for Bugs Bunny’s 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) and Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island (1983). And then he retired, living out his life in peace and dying on natural causes in 1995 at the age of 91.

Friz Freleng is still remembered as one of the luminaries of the art of animation. His colleagues thought very highly of him, leading Chuck Jones to once state: “He was a giant, in my best estimation, and it is hard to recognize a giant in your midst when he was only five foot four.”