Barbera, Joseph Roland

▪ 2007

      American motion-picture animator (b. March 24, 1911, New York, N.Y.—d. Dec. 18, 2006, Los Angeles, Calif.), collaborated for more than half a century with William Hanna, and the two created some of the most beloved characters on the big and small screen, including Tom (the cat) and Jerry (the mouse) for MGM and such TV favourites as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, and the Jetsons. Barbera was working as a bank accountant with the Irving Trust Co. in New York City during the early 1930s when he started submitting cartoons to magazines; he sold his first to Collier's magazine and decided to forsake banking for cartooning. He joined MGM as a sketch artist in 1937, the same year as Hanna. Hanna and Barbera produced more than 200 films in the Tom and Jerry series between 1940 and 1957, and they won seven Oscars for their cartoons between 1943 and 1952. After 1957, when they formed Hanna-Barbera Productions, they made a prodigious number of cartoon series for television. They were derided for employing cut-rate limited-animation techniques, which allowed for the speedy production of television cartoons, but were praised for the quality of writing found in their most successful productions.

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