Bob Givens, a veteran animator who helped design such classic characters as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, has died at age 99.
Givens died December 14 in Burbank, California, of acute respiratory failure, his daughter Mariana Givens told the Associated Press.
Over a six-decade career, he also illustrated Tom and Jerry, Daffy Duck, Popeye and Alvin and the Chipmunks.
In addition, he animated the cartoon cockroaches for a series of TV commercials for Raid bug spray.
He began his work in animation at Walt Disney Studios, which he joined right out of high school and where he worked with the team on the company’s first animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
He soon joined the animation house that would become Warner Bros., working with animation director Tex Avery on a new version of the studio’s cartoon rabbit who was renamed Bugs Bunny for his 1940 debut short, “A Wild Hare.”
According to the L.A. Times, the studio’s pre-Bugs rabbit was “too cute, so Tex asked me to do [another] one,” Givens told Michael Barrier, author of “Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.”
Along with the dim-witted hunter Elmer Fudd, Bugs became a cartoon superstar.