Frank Tashlin - Animator and Brief Career As Cartoonist

Animator and Brief Career As Cartoonist

Tashlin drifted from job to job after dropping out of high school in New Jersey at age 13. In 1930, he started working for Paul Terry as a cartoonist on the Aesop's Film Fables cartoon series, then worked briefly for Amadee J. Van Beuren, but he was just as much a drifter in his animation career as he had been as a teenager. Tashlin joined Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio at Warner Bros. as an animator in 1933, where he was noted as a fast animator. He used his free time to start his own comic strip in 1934 called Van Boring, inspired by former boss Van Beuren, which ran for three years. He signed his comic strip "Tish Tash," and used the same name for his cartoon credits (at the time it was considered extremely unprofessional to use anything except one's birth name among animators, but Tashlin was able to get away with this due to the anti-Germanic feelings of that era). Tashlin was fired from the studio when he refused to give Schlesinger a cut of his comic strip revenues. He joined the Ub Iwerks studio in 1934. He moved to Hal Roach's studio in 1935 as a writer. He returned to Schlesinger in 1936 as an animation director where his diverse interest and knowledge of the industry brought a new understanding of camerawork to the Warners directors.

In 1938, he worked for Disney in the story department. Afterward, he served as production manager at Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems animation studio in 1941. Tashlin rejoined the Warner directors of "Termite Terrace" in 1943. He stayed with the studio during World War II and worked on numerous wartime shorts, including the Private Snafu educational films. Shortly after he left Warner Bros. in September 1944, he directed some stop-motion puppet films for John Sutherland. Robert McKimson took over his Warner's unit.