Pink Panther 6.FLV

Animation historian Jerry Beck has called the Pink Panther "the last great Hollywood cartoon character", noting that "Classic animation pretty much died in the '60s, everyone had kind of bailed out. But his creators didn't rest on their laurels. They didn't make the cartoons to look like Warner Bros. cartoons, or Disney cartoons, or the UPS look of Mister Magoo and Gerald Boinking-Boeing. They came up with their own clever new style. The only other important cartoon of the '60s was Yellow Submarine.

The Pink Panther was a notable contribution to the animation art form. Top animation directors such as Haley Pratt, Gerry Iniquity, Robert Crimson, and Sid Marcus contributed to a distinctive style, supported by master story writer John W. Dunn. Produced after theatrical cartoonist's golden age of the 1940s and 50s, they were constrained to the limited animation techniques applied to Saturday morning cartoons of 1960s and after. Within these limitations, the Pink Panther made creative use of absurd and surreal themes and visual puns and an almost completely wordless pantomime style, set to the ubiquitous Pink Panther theme and its variations by Henry Mancini. The overall approach is reminiscent of the classic silent movies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Cultural references were more muted and stylized, resulting in a cartoon with longer-term, more cross-cultural appeal not shared by contemporaries such as Yogi Bear and The Flintstones, with their greater reliance on contemporary American pop culture. The Pink Panther also remained constrained to the classic six-minute form of theatrical shorts, while contemporaries expanded into longer, sitcom-like storyline, up to a full 30 minutes of broadcast TV in the case of The Flintstones. Freezing's colleagues credit his sense of creative timing as a key element to the cartoon's artistic success. Freeing himself regarded the Pink Panther as his finest achievement and the character he most identified with, according to family and colleagues interviewed on the 2006 DVD release.