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Ernest Pintoff won the Oscar for best animated short for The Critic (1963), a satire on modern art written and narrated by Mel Brooks. Pintoff previously earned an Oscar nomination for his animated short The Violinist (1959), narrated by Carl Reiner. For television Pintoff directed episodes of numerous series, including Hawaii Five-O (1968), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and Falcon Crest (1981). 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." 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. 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. He began his animation career in 1956. After suffering a stroke in 1983, he turned to writing books, including a memoir ("Bolt From the Blue"), a novel ("Zachary") and animation textbooks.
He died from complications of a stroke on January 12, 2002, in Woodland Hills, CA. He is survived by his wife, Caroline; son Jonathan of Los Angeles; daughter Gabrielle Stornaiuolo of San Francisco; and three grandsons.
