Isadore Freleng

Isadore "Friz" Freleng (August 21, 1906 –May 26, 1995) was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio's biggest stars, including Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester , Yosemite Sam (to whom he was said to bear more than a passing resemblance) and Speedy Gonzales. The senior director at Warners' Termite Terrace studio, Freleng is also the most honored of the Warners directors, having won four Academy Awards. After Warners shut down the animation studio in 1963, Freleng and business partner David DePatie founded DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which produced cartoons (notably The Pink Panther Show), feature film title sequences, and Saturday morning cartoons through the early 1980s.

Early career
Freleng was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where he began his career in animation at United Film Ad Service. There, he made the acquaintance of fellow animators Hugh Harman and Ub Iwerks. In 1923, Iwerks' friend Walt Disney moved to Hollywood, put out a call for his Kansas City colleagues to join him. Freleng, however, held out until 1927, when he finally moved to California and join the Disney studio. He worked alongside other former Kansas City animators, including Iwerks, Harman, Carmen Maxwell, and Rudolph Ising. While at Disney's Freleng worked on the Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for producers Margaret Winkler and Charles Mintz.

Freleng soon teamed up with Harman and Ising to try to create their own studio. The trio produced a pilot film starring a new Minnie Mouse-like character named Lola Bunny. Looking at unemployment if the cartoon failed to generate interest, Freleng moved to New York City to work on Mintz' Krazy Kat cartoons, all the while still trying to sell the Harman-Ising Bosko picture. The cartoon finally sold to Leon Schlesinger, who soon secured Harman and Ising to star Bosko in the Looney Tunes series he was producing for Warner Bros. Freleng soon moved back to California to work with Harman and Ising once again.

Freleng as director
Harman and Ising left Schlesinger's studio over disputes about budgets in 1933. Schlesinger was left with no experienced directors, and therefore promoted Freleng. The young animator would prove an able director, and he introduced the studio's first post-Bosko star, Porky Pig, in the 1935 film I Haven't Got a Hat. The film is notable for being one of the earliest examples of characterization in a cartoon. Porky was a distinctive character, unlike Bosko or his replacement, Buddy.

MGM
In 1937, Freleng left Schlesinger's after accepting an increase in salary to direct for the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio headed by Fred Quimby. To Freleng's chagrin, he found he would be working on The Captain and the Kids, adapted from the popular comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids. The series failed to achieve much success, much as Freleng had predicted&mdash;though skillfully animated, the characters could not compete with the "funny animals" that pervaded at the time.

Freleng happily returned to Warner Bros. when his contract ended in 1940. One of the first Looney Tunes directed by Freleng during his second tenure at the studio was You Ought to Be in Pictures , a short which blended animation with live-action footage of the Warner Bros. studio (and of Schlesinger veterans such as story man Michael Maltese and even "Leon" himself). The plot, which centers around Porky Pig being tricked by Daffy Duck into terminating his contract with Schlesinger to attempt a career in features, echoes Freleng's experience in moving to MGM.

Directorial achievements
Schlesinger's hands-off attitude toward his animators allowed Freleng and his fellow directors almost complete creative control and room to experiment with cartoon comedy styles, which allowed the studio to kept pace with the Disney studio's technical superiority. Freleng's style quickly matured, and he became a master of comic timing. He also introduced or redesigned a number of famous Warner characters, including Yosemite Sam in 1945, the cat-and-bird duo, Sylvester and Tweety in 1947, and Speedy Gonzales in 1955.

Freleng and Chuck Jones would dominate the Warner Bros. studio in the years after World War II, Freleng largely confining himself to these few characters and Bugs Bunny. Freleng also continued to produce modernized versions of the musical comedies he animated in his early career, such as The Three Little Bops (1957) and Pizzacato Pussycat (1955). Freleng won four Oscars during his time at Warner Bros., for the films Tweetie Pie (1947), Speedy Gonzales (1955), Knighty Knight Bugs (1958) and Birds Anonymous (1957).

Dr. Seuss Classics
After the Warners studio closed in 1965, Freleng rented the space to create cartoons with producer Dave DePatie, forming DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. When Warner Bros decided to reopen their cartoon studio in 1964, they did so in name only; DePatie-Freleng produced the cartoons into 1966.

While much of Freleng's post-Warner work is considered of lesser quality than his earlier achievements, the DePatie-Freleng studio's signature achievement was The Pink Panther. DePatie-Freleng was commissioned to create the opening titles for the 1963 film The Pink Panther, for which Freleng created a suave, cool cat character. The Pink Panther cartoon character became so popular that United Artists, distributors of The Pink Panther, had Freleng produce a short cartoon starring the character, The Pink Phink (1964).

After The Pink Phink won the 1965 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons), Freleng and DePatie produced a whole series of responded by making a whole series of Pink Panther cartoons. Other original cartoon series, among them The Inspector, The Ant and the Aardvark, and Hoot Kloot, soon followed. In 1969, The Pink Panther Show, a Saturday morning anthology program featuring DePatie-Freleng cartoons, debuted on NBC. The Pink Panther and the other original DePatie-Freleng series would remain in production through 1980, with new cartoons produced for simultaneous Saturday morning broadcast and United Artists theatrical release.

By 1967, DePatie and Freleng had moved their operations to the San Fernando Valley. One of their projects featured Bing Crosby and his family called, Goldilocks and had songs by the Sherman Brothers. At their new facilities they continued to produce new cartoons until 1980, when they sold DePatie-Freleng to Marvel Entertainment, who renamed it Marvel Productions.

Later career
Freleng later served as an executive producer on three 1980s Looney Tunes compilation features, which linked together several of the classic shorts with new animated sequences. The Freleng-produced compilation features were The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1981), Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982), and Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island (1983).

Friz Freleng died of natural causes in 1995 at age 89. He was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Trivia

 * A caricature of Freleng can be seen in Chuck Jones' 1952 short The Hasty Hare. Freleng  appears as "I. Frisby", the head of Shalomar Observatory.