Animator Friz Freleng Dies at 89 : Hollywood: Warner Bros. artist, a primal force in film cartoons, drew Bugs, Daffy and Porky, and was the inspiration for Yosemite Sam.

Isadore (Friz) Freleng, the blithe spirit who helped give life to a menagerie of such madcap merrymakers as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety Bird and who also became the personification of Yosemite Sam, died Friday morning.

A spokesman for Warner Bros., where he had worked sporadically for 65 years--most recently on the creation of limited-edition cels based on four of his more than 300 cartoons--said the doyen of animators was 89 and died at UCLA Medical Center.

With Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, Freleng was a primal force in the history of the film cartoon, operating out of offices the artists dubbed Termite Terrace. The sobriquet was as irreverent as the string of Merrie Melodies characters the raucous quartet fathered there over the years.

Jones, learning of his old friend’s death, said Friday from his Orange County home that Termite Terrace was in reality an old bungalow at Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue where the Warner directors, animators and writers gathered.

“We had what we called the Period of the Big Yes, where we cooperated on each other’s projects,” Jones said. “The idea was to minimize competition, which had destroyed so many other studio animation units. . . . But each director also was ultimately responsible for hisown project. . . .

“All of us would regularly produce a Bugs or a Porky Pig or an Elmer Fudd, but we also had a special character too. . . . Friz’s was Yosemite Sam. We would tease Friz that if he ever exploded the result would be similar to what Sam did when he was angry.”

Freleng even admitted to serving as inspiration for the gun-slinging, brazen Sam.

“I have the same temperament,” Freleng told the Associated Press. “I’m small, and I used to have a red mustache.”

At his death, Freleng had earned four Academy Awards plus a special Oscar for the “The Pink Phink,” a cartoon featuring the Pink Panther character Freleng had created.

It was the cels for those Oscar winners (“Tweetie Pie” in 1947, “Speedy Gonzalez” in 1955, “Birds Anonymous” in 1957 and “Knighty Knight Bugs” in 1958) that became Freleng’s final project.

The animator began drawing for a living in his native Kansas City, Mo., moving to Hollywood in 1927. He worked for Walt Disney for two years before founding the Warner animation studio as head animator in 1930 along with Rudolf Ising and Hugh Harman.

(Most of the animators who ended up at Warner had also worked for Leon Schlesinger, who was making animated shorts independently and selling them to the studios.)

Freleng animated the first Warner Looney Tunes cartoon, “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub,” in 1930, and moved from animator to director in 1933.

In that position he synchronized music and film in the now legendary Merrie Melodies series, early adventures in film color. One of the characters he introduced was a pudgy pig with a speech impediment named Porky in a film called “I Haven’t Got a Hat” (1935).

In 1937 Freleng went to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot, but he soon returned to Warner and stayed there until 1962, when television minimized the need for a steady diet of theatrical cartoons and the animation unit was drastically reduced.

In 1963 Freleng established DePatie-Freleng Enterprises Inc. with David H. DePatie. They produced TV and theatrical shorts, commercials and the fey Pink Panther character, which also was used to introduce films featuring the pratfalling Inspector Clouseau played by Peter Sellers.

But it was Freleng’s earlier output for which he will be remembered.

During the zany days of Termite Terrace, two generations of American children (and their parents) sat in large, lavishly decorated theaters to see Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester, Porky, Yosemite and others move to center screen among two feature films, newsreels and coming attractions that then made moviegoing a four-hour experience.

Audiences heard the voices of Mel Blanc, June Foray, Daws Butler and a very young Stan Freberg.

For a self-described iconoclast, Freleng was honored by some very respectable organizations: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists’ Guild, the British Film Institute and the International Animated Film Society.

In 1981, a golden anniversary celebration of Warner animators was held to coincide with “The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie,” a feature film made by a revitalized Warner animation department that Freleng was chosen to head. Many in the industry hoped it would re-establish the cartoon as a major factor in the industry.

Freleng said it was “the greatest night I’ve ever faced” as he reminisced with old comrades.

One of them, Jones, who remained a friend until Freleng’s death, said:

“Friz won the only Oscar Bugs Bunny ever garnered (‘Knighty Knight Bugs’) and produced what I feel is the greatest cartoon ever--’Birds Anonymous.’

“It involved a group of cats trying to kick the bird-eating habit and kinda showed how humans and animals often share the same foibles.

“Friz was a great man, who really put Warner Bros. animation together. He was the guiding light who made it all worthwhile. . . . He had the most magnificent timing sense of any man I’ve known.”

Freleng is survived by his wife, Lily, two daughters and four grandchildren. Donations may be made in his name to the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte.