Friz Freleng

Origins and early life

Isadore "Friz" Freleng — credited simply as I. Freleng early on — was born in Kansas City in 1905 to Louis Mendel Freleng, a Polish Jewish immigrant from Kutno, and Elka Ribakoff, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from the Odesa region.

Work and career

He joined Walt Disney at Winkler Pictures in 1927 and was let go the following year, then spent his career at Warner Bros. on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Senior director of the studio nicknamed Termite Terrace, he directed 266 cartoons — more than anyone else there — and worked on more than three hundred in all. He introduced or developed Porky Pig (in I Haven't Got a Hat, 1935), Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, whom he was said to resemble more than a little, Tweety, Sylvester, Granny and Speedy Gonzales.

A classically trained violinist, he timed his cartoons on musical bar sheets alongside Carl Stalling, Milt Franklyn and William Lava, which gave Rhapsody in Rivets (1941), Pigs in a Polka (1943) and Three Little Bops (1957).

Recognition

He is the most decorated of the Warner directors: five Academy Awards — Tweetie Pie (1947), Speedy Gonzales (1955), Birds Anonymous (1957), Knighty Knight Bugs (1958) and The Pink Phink (1964) — and three Emmy Awards. When Warner Bros. closed its animation studio in 1963 he founded DePatie–Freleng Enterprises with David H. DePatie, where the Pink Panther was born for the title sequence of the 1963 film and then given shorts of his own and The Pink Panther Show, alongside the Inspector, the Ant and the Aardvark, the Tijuana Toads, the Dogfather, Roland and Rattfink and Crazylegs Crane; the studio also made title sequences for films and television, among them I Dream of Jeannie, and animated the lightsaber blades for Star Wars in 1977.

Sold to Marvel Comics in 1980 and wound up in 1981, it sent Freleng back to Warner Bros.' relaunched animation division, where he produced The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1981), Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) and Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island (1983). He stepped down in 1986 and died in 1995, aged eighty-nine.