Ernest Pintoff

He taught directing at the School of Visual Arts, the American Film Institute, the California Institute of the Arts and UCLA, and received the International Animated Film Society's Winsor McCay Award for distinguished lifetime contributions to the art of animation in 1998. Born in Watertown, CT, and raised in New York City, Pintoff originally was a jazz trumpeter and later taught painting and design at Michigan State University.

After suffering a stroke in 1983, he turned to writing books, including a memoir ("Bolt From the Blue"), a novel ("Zachary") and animation textbooks.

" Among Pintoff's feature credits as a director are the low-budget Who Killed Mary Whats'ername? (1971), starring Red Buttons, and Dynamite Chicken (1971), a collection of songs, skits, commercial parodies and old movie clips with appearances by Richard Pryor, John Lennon, Andy Warhol and other celebrities.

For television Pintoff directed episodes of numerous series, including Hawaii Five-O (1968), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and Falcon Crest (1981).

Ernest Pintoff won the Oscar for best animated short for The Critic (1963), a satire on modern art written and narrated by Mel Brooks.

As part of NBC's "Experiments in Television" in the late 1960s, he directed the documentaries "This Is Marshall McLuhan" and "This Is Sholem Aleichem.

Pintoff previously earned an Oscar nomination for his animated short The Violinist (1959), narrated by Carl Reiner.

He began his animation career in 1956.