Robert Givens was born in 1918, which makes him 99 years old. He graduated high school in 1936 and two years later, went to work for Walt Disney as an artist. That was in time to work on many of the classic Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and on a film you may have heard of called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Two years later, he moved over to Leon Schlesinger's studio to work on what we now think of as Warner Brothers cartoons. One of his first jobs there was to redesign a rabbit character they'd been fooling around with and also a hunter character for the film A Wild Hare. That cartoon is considered by many to be the first and archetype appearances of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, and most of what Mr. Givens did would survive subsequent refinements of those characters.
He worked for Schlesinger and the subsequent Warner Brothers studio for years after, not as an animator but as a layout artist and character designer, and he occasionally contributed so much to a cartoon that they gave him story credit. He left for a time to serve in World War II and to work on training films and for RKO, then left again to work for UPA for years on all of its cartoons, including Mister Magoo. Later, he worked for Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng, Filmation. MGM, whatever studio Chuck Jones was directing for at the time and even for Film Roman on Bobby's World and the first four seasons of Garfield and Friends.
This is a very partial rundown of the man's career. He also did hundreds of jobs for Western Publishing drawing Dell and Gold Key comic books (mainly of Disney properties) and children's books. His last professional credit was the 2001 feature, Timber Wolf, directed by Chuck Jones. About the time Chuck died the following year, Bob retired from drawing, though he did some teaching…and you may be wondering what he's doing these days.
Well, today he was out at the Disney lot in Burbank and at lunchtime, artists from all over that lot assembled in an auditorium to hear him field questions from four animation experts — or maybe it was three animation experts plus me. That's us in the photo above. Standing are the Marks: At left is Mark Kausler and at right is Yours Truly, poorly-lit. That's Bob in the center and on the left is Jerry Beck and at right is Leonard Maltin. And we were also honored by the presence in the room of Friz Freleng's daughters, Sybil and Hope, who recalled how fond their father was of Bob.
We screened A Wild Hare and then peppered Bob with questions for an hour or so, then we retired to a private dining room for lunch. There, Bob didn't get much to eat because we continued to fire questions at him. Even at his age, he's still sharp, he still remembers plenty…and since he worked with everyone, there was no let-up in the interrogation. I asked him a lot about his time at UPA, like what he remembered about the Dick Tracy cartoons ("Cheapest thing we ever did") and how drunk Jim Backus was in Magoo recording sessions ("Sometimes, very").
Bob's been interviewed many times before. Here's one and here's one and here's one and there are many others online. I dunno if the one we did will wind up online or if it'll disappear forever into the Disney Studio Library but a lot of new animators and artists were sure thrilled to be there and meet this man and hear what he had to say. So was I.