Frank Tashlin (born Francis Fredrick von Taschlein, February 19, 1913 – May 5, 1972), also known as Tish Tash and Frank Tash, was an American animator and filmmaker. He was best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated shorts for Warner Bros., as well as his work as a director of live-action comedy films.
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Animator and brief career as cartoonist
Born in Weehawken, New Jersey, Tashlin drifted from job to job after dropping out of high school in New Jersey at age 13. In 1930, he began working for John Foster as a cartoonist on the Aesop's Fables cartoon series, then worked briefly at Van Beuren Studios, 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. Pictures as an animator in 1933, where he was known as a fast animator. He used his free time to start his own comic strip in 1934 called Van Boring, inspired by former boss Amedee J. 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-German sentiment of that era). Tashlin was fired from the studio when he refused to give Schlesinger a cut of his comic strip revenues. He joined Animated Pictures Corp. in 1934, and moved to Hal Roach's studio the next year as a writer.