Of course, never once did anyone hear words such as these from Tex Avery—he was not one to pontificate—but for all of us who worked with him and beside him the message was loud and clear; by his example he taught us. I would have imitated him, I suppose, if I had the remotest idea how to go about it, but since imitation of Tex Avery was impossible—others tried and fell short—I found to my pleasure and surprise that these rules applied equally well to all humor and all character animation. So there was plenty of room for me to seek my own way.
Joe Adamson in Tex Avery, King of Cartoons,* probably brought the chubby will-o’-the-wisp named Tex into focus as well as anyone could, as difficult a task perhaps as Tex’s instruction to an associate, after breaking wind: “Catch that one and paint it green.” But Adamson came as close as possible: “Chuck Jones’ coyote can fall five miles from a precipice and still be alive when he gets to the bottom. Tex Avery’s wolf could probably endure such a fall but is more likely to develop brakes on the way down. It is the creation of the director’s own universe, and the maintaining of that universe, that makes animation a medium capable of individual, personal expression, and what allows us to tell one animation director from another.”
Tex Avery’s could never be mistaken for anyone else’s in animation. Consider: “Avery’s films will roll along harmlessly enough, with an interesting situation treated in a more or less funny way. Then, all of a sudden, one of the characters will lose a leg and hop all over the place trying to find it again … In Slap-Happy Lion, a kangaroo hops into its own pocket and disappears. In Billy Boy, a goat is rocketed to the moon and eats it. In Homesteader Droopy, a pistol gets wounded in the midst of a gun battle and the owner must put it out of its misery.”†
Tex, more than any other director, was fascinated by the limitless possible extensions of the medium. He simply ignored all the physical laws of the universe, with, perhaps, an occasional nod to the law of gravity.
As an animator I worked for both Tex and Friz Freleng for a couple of years each.
As a director I worked parallel to Friz Freleng for almost twenty-five years. He was, and is, stimulating, irritating, loyal, cynical, wise, funny, stubborn, pragmatic, explosive, intelligent, impatient with stupidity, generous with everything he could think of to improve another director’s pictures … hopeful but not demanding that you would do the same for him, irritating (this time because he could detect real weakness in a storyboard with bewildering insight and never hesitated to state it), a superb draftsman though he did not know it then and does not know it now, insane, to be sure, what else?—and yet one of the sanest men I have ever known—and the funniest—and the most innocent of his own talent.
That’s a hell of a lot of attributes to carry around in one freckled head. He used to have a Friz frieze of red hair around the gray matter in that baffling skull. Yosemite Sam lived there—usually caged, but so did small birds and fluttery little old ladies and frustrated cats and voracious mice, too: one of the funniest, most thoughtful and touching cartoons of all time is Birds Anonymous. Try also the one about the starving mouse who tried to eat cats. Try also Sahara Hare, Knighty Knight Bugs, and many others, including the two about a pair of Cockney dogs—“Spike’s my hero” was the key line, just as “Friz’s my hero” is mine.
Friz Freleng’s brilliant layout of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam: BUGS BUNNY RIDES AGAIN (1948)
Friz timed his pictures on musical bar sheets in the most beautiful tiny lettering style you ever saw. These were then transferred onto exposure sheets.
No one except Tex Avery had as perfect a sense of timing as did Friz Freleng, and no one could pre-time a picture with as absolute certainty as he could.
Live-action directors find it difficult to believe what directors at Warner Bros. cartoon division were called upon to do: pre-time and pre-edit a picture to within eight frames (one-third of a second) of its ultimate length before going to the camera or the animator. That’s what we had to do, and the master of this arcane art was Friz Freleng.
He understood also the drollity (drollness? drolliciousness?) of failure and imperfect behavior. If Sylvester built a ladder in search of avian tiffin, he always dropped something or bent a nail or stubbed his toe, and by so doing achieved the credibility, the believability common to all great comedians. It is the sheer awkwardness of their efforts to achieve their goals that makes us relate to them, sympathize with them, and ultimately laugh with them.
Production manager Johnny Burton and Friz Freleng with Friz’s Oscar
Laugh with them—not at them. This great rule is as true of Friz Freleng’s characters as it is true of Langdon, Keaton (Buster and Diane), and, of course, Chaplin, as well as the Chaplin of the latter-day saints, Woody Allen.
Animation as Friz Freleng directs it demonstrates the peculiar and little-understood anatomy of motion pictures in general. Many people working in the field of animation think of themselves as graphic artists, which is like a motion-picture photographer mistakenly comparing himself to a still photographer. Actually, shooting motion pictures, including animation, and performing music are very similar indeed—one, impinging a successive series of varied sounds on the ear; the other, impinging a successive series of varied sights on the eyes. It is no coincidence then, it is just plain good sense, that Friz Freleng set down the timing of his films on musical bar sheets.
Friz is a musician as well as an excellent draftsman, and it is not surprising that many of
