He’s been staying at the hospital for testing – and it looks like he’ll have open heart surgery in the next couple of days. He asked if you would get the word out so people know he’s safe and keep him in thoughts and prayers.
Prior to his medical emergency, Jim provided us with his Animation Anecdotes/Suspended Animation column for this week and next – and we will post them according to his wishes. We’ll also provide a further update on his condition next week.
Jim does not use social media – but he will see this post, so if you’d like to send a message please place it in the comments below.
Get well, Jim. We’ll be here when you return to full health. All my best wishes for a speedy recovery. – Jerry Beck
Suspended Animation #409
While reading today’s column, it may help if you remember that the character of Yosemite Sam—a short, fiery-tempered outlaw who was known to shoot himself in the foot—was directly based on animator and director Friz Freleng himself.
Freleng joined the United Film Ad Service (the same company where Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney himself had learned to animate) shortly after his high school graduation.
Hugh Harman who was working there was leaving soon to join Walt Disney in Hollywood. Freleng desperately tried to learn as much technique as he could from the animator before he left. Harman also suggested Freleng get a copy of the book Animated Cartoons by E.G. Lutz. Freleng ran down to the library and checked out the very same copy that Walt Disney had checked out years before to learn the art of animation.
He began a correspondence with Walt Disney, who was looking for new animators for his expanding studio. Hugh Harman had told Walt that Freleng had shown a lot of promise when they worked together briefly at the United Film Ad.
Walt offered Freleng ten dollars more per week than Freleng was currently earning. So, in January 1927, Freleng boarded a train and headed to California.
In Los Angeles at Union Station, Walt Disney in his newly purchased Moon Roadster automobile picked up Freleng and drove directly to the Disney Studio on Hyperion. Freleng was greeted by Walt’s entire staff including Hugh Harman, his brother Walker Harman, Ub Iwerks, Rudy Ising, and Roy Disney.
The studio was finishing up its commitment to producing the final Alice Comedies before beginning work on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Freleng did bits and pieces of animation on at least nine of the last “Alice Comedies” that he didn’t remember clearly when I talked with him. He did, however, remember a compliment that Walt had given him in front of the rest of the studio on a scene he had animated in Alice’s Picnic.
Walker Harman, Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Friz Freleng, & Roy Disney.
In front: Lois Hardwick and Walt Disney.
The script had said merely a “mother cat bathing her kittens.” Freleng came up with the personality animation gag of a little kitten crawling out of the tub to escape the bath and hanging on the edge of the tub before dropping down to the ground and being scooped up by the mother and put back into the tub.
“That’s what I want to see in my pictures,” said Walt. “I want the characters to be somebody. I don’t want them just to be a drawing.”
The Disney Studio was so small that Freleng sat right next to animation legend Ub Iwerks. Freleng remembered Iwerks as a quiet person but very helpful. When Freleng struggled with animating an army tank that had to turn and go off into the distance, Iwerks just took a pencil and drew one tank after another in perfect perspective in less than five minutes as a guide for the aspiring animator.
By March 1927, Freleng was listed on the studio records as a top animator and animated a large amount of footage on the very last of the Alice Comedies known as Alice in the Big League.
Freleng recalled, “(Walt) would flip a scene to see what was wrong but he was very intolerant. If I made a mistake, he might get very angry and, of course, that would make me angry. I reminded him that I had written him that I was just learning so I was bound to make mistakes. He had written back that he was willing to patiently teach. That’s why I decided to move to California, which was a big decision.
“I told him that a good teacher points out the good as well as the bad but he always seemed to concentrate on the bad. He told me he appreciated me having enough guts to tell him what was on my mind and for a while things ran smoothly. But days later, he started in on me again.”
Freleng worked on the first theatrical released Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon, Trolley Troubles. Freleng was given the scene to animate where Oswald pulls off his “lucky” rabbit’s foot to rub it. In the days before storyboards, the description was typed but not illustrated.
A frustrated Freleng went to Walt to ask how to stage the scene. When the foot was removed, should Freleng show the bone or what? Should it screw off like a table leg or just pop off? According to Freleng, Walt was very dismissive and just said, “Oh, you know what to do,” and left.
Could this be the chairs at Disney in 1927?
One morning, Freleng woke up with a small but painful boil on his rear end. He realized that sitting in the hard chairs at the Disney Studio would only aggravate the pain so he decided to call in sick.
However, it wasn’t much better at home so he decided to go see a movie in the hopes that the padded seats and air conditioning might take his mind off the pain.
He was going to catch a movie playing at the Carthay Circle Theatre (where both Skeleton Dance and later Snow White premiered) on Wilshire Boulevard. Since he had no car, Freleng took one of the double-decker buses that ran down the street. The upper deck had no roof and gave a panoramic view of the city.
That is where Freleng decided to sit.
At a stop, Freleng noticed that behind the bus was Walt Disney himself in his Moon Roadster. When Freleng returned to work the next day, he found that his desk had been cleared off and everything he had been working on was gone.
Freleng went to see Walt, who was angry that Freleng had taken the day off when he wasn’t sick. Freleng’s explanation to the contrary fell on deaf years.
“I had a boil on my butt!” yelled Freleng over and over, and in a fit of temper offered to give two weeks notice.
“You don’t have to give me any notice. You can quit now,” Disney supposedly responded.
Walt called Roy and Ub and told them that Freleng wanted to quit. Roy felt that if Freleng was unhappy, he should be allowed to leave. Freleng insisted on getting a fifty dollar bonus that had been promised him because he needed that money to get back home to Kansas City.
Walt insisted that Freleng had forfeited the bonus because of his actions, but reportedly with some influence by Roy and Ub, Walt relented. Freleng and his brother (who was working at the studio in ink and paint) took a bus home, where Freleng got his old job back at United Film Ad Service.
The hard feelings between Walt and Freleng lasted until their deaths. When Walt would screen Warner Bros shorts at the studio and the name “I. Freleng” appeared on the screen, he would make the same Midwest farmer boy joke that the cartoon had been directed by “I. P. Freely.”
Shortly before his death, Freleng grudgingly admitted in an interview about Walt Disney that, “Now I know he was a genius, and it’s pretty hard to work for a genius because you’ve got to think and do things like he wants.”
