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Chuck Jones revealed Friz Freleng's secret method behind his musical cartoons
Freleng was in tune with his cartoons!
The Looney Tunes library contains hundreds of classic cartoons, but some of the stand-outs are the musical cartoons. Those special shorts where the story follows along a classic song, animated to perfect timing with every movement of the piece. In Mouse Mazurka, the mouse tosses a bottle of nitroglycerin perfectly as each violin string plucks. In Pigs in a Polka, the Three Little Pigs build their houses, and each step in the building process is a beat in Johannes Brahms' "Hungarian Dances". Friz Freleng directed these musical cartoons and many more, but how did he get so good at musical cartoons?
According to Freleng's friend and colleague, Chuck Jones, Freleng was both a musician and an animator. In his memoir Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, Jones described Freleng's secret sauce: “Friz timed his pictures on musical bar sheets in the most beautiful tiny letttering style you ever saw...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.”
Creating a storyboard on sheet music ensured that each measure had animated movement assigned to it, giving Freleng's cartoons a lyrical feeling because the animation flowed with each note of the song. This approach gave each cartoon a feeling of smoothness and delighted audiences as the images on screen closely matched the movement of the music.
Jones felt that Freleng's musical style showed that animation wasn't just about being good at drawing, but about understanding the role of time in storytelling: “Animation as Friz Freleng directs it demonstrates the peculiar and little-understood anatomy of motion pictures in general…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 music bar sheets.”
Other cartoonists followed Freleng's example of timing their cartoons to music, like Chuck Jones and Bill Hanna, who also came from a musical background. Some of Friz Freleng's best musical cartoons include Rhapsody in Rivets, Holiday for Shoestrings, Lights Fantastic, Pigs in a Polka, Rhapsody Rabbit, and Mouse Mazurka.
