Chuck Jones: An Appreciation

Chuck Jones, who died aged 89 at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif., on Feb. 22, ranked one of the most important figures in the history of commercial animation. Along with Tex Avery and Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng and later Robert McKimson, he established the distinctive Warner Bros. style of cartoons, which differed not just visually but in their whole ethos from the output of the Disney rival. It could be said that, while Disney dominated feature animation, short animation belong to Warner’s.

Avery, Clampett and Jones served as the chief innovators among this crew. While Avery and Clampett explored new frontiers of conceptual zaniness and surrealism, Jones made exceptional advances in the visual nature of the animated short. Between the three of them, they revolutionized what cartoons could do, and how they could do it.

Charles Martin Jones was born on Sept. 21, 1912, in Spokane, Wash., the third of four children. The family cherished a passion for books. Jones traced his lifelong devotion to the works of Mark Twain to the age of five, when his family rented a furnished house and discovered the previous occupants left behind a complete set of Twain’s collected works. Jones’ father habitually started businesses that soon failed, generating an endless supply of redundant letterhead notepaper. The family encouraged the children to use up the letterhead by drawing on it, thereby creating a whole family of industrious artists.

Jones grew up in Hollywood, near the Charles Chaplin studio. His first direct involvement in movies came as a child extra in a Mac Sennett comedy. Jones would later credit Chaplin with teaching him the art of timing, something he became almost obsessional about. When Wile E. Coyote falls off yet another butte and vanishes into the distance below, the time-lapse between his disappearance and the puff of dust was calculated by Jones to the exact frame for maximum effect.

Jones dropped out of high school, entering the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of 15. His formal art training here included classes in anatomy, which stood him in good stead throughout his animation career. As he once explained, no real rabbit could ever move like Bugs Bunny, but if a rabbit had Bugs’s body then that was how he would move. Conversely, if you wanted a rabbit to move like Bugs, then you had to give it a body like Bugs’s. Thanks to his knowledge of anatomy, Jones could more easily manage this balance, with the result that Bugs (and the other characters Chuck drew) seems to move completely naturally, even though the whole effect is of course complete artifice.

After art school Jones held various jobs, including as a street portraitist, before gaining employment at Celebrity Pictures — the Pat Powers’s studio run by legendary animator Ub Iwerks (the co-creator of Mickey Mouse, among much else). Jones worked as a cel washer. (Since celluloid was expensive, old cels were washed clean for reuse.)

The studio also boasted another legendary animator, one who likewise received formal art training: Grim Natwick. Natwick recognized in the young artist a kindred spirit — someone who knew how to draw, a rare quality among the animators of the day. Natwick took Jones under his wing and taught him the rudiments of animation.

Soon fired from Celebrity Pictures, Jones spent a brief period as a freelance portraitist. In 1933 he joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, the studio that supplied Warner Bros. with all its cartoons. Schlesinger’s interest in those cartoons extended little beyond the financial, which meant that his animators — the occupants of the so-called Termite Terrace — enjoyed remarkable creative freedom.

Jones and Clampett worked as assistants to Tex Avery. The influence of Avery on Jones’s subsequent work is obvious. In particular, Jones converted to Avery’s view of animation as an artform in its own right, rather than as a dependent of other artforms. In practice, this meant that while Disney tried to make its animations more and more like live-action movies, the Warner team was moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Two, much later Warner shorts by Jones exemplify this. In Duck Amuck (1953) the entire short depends on the fact that it is a cartoon. Daffy Duck knows that this is so, and that he himself is a cartoon character working in a cartoon universe with its own physical laws. The other is The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall (1942), a truly groundbreaking short, which abandoned any visual pretence at realism.

Schlesinger encouraged the use of limited animation for the Warner shorts, regardless of considerations of quality, because the technique cost less. In The Dover Boys Jones showed that, with artistry, the technique could be used to great advantage, and the quality of the product need not suffer. John Hubley, notably, picked up this message and ran with it in the “Mr. Magoo” shorts and others produced by United Productions of America. Unfortunately, lesser animators interpreted the message to mean that limited animation was enough in itself, with ghastly results.

Warner Bros. eventually bought out Schlesinger’s studio. In fact, Warner’s actually closed the studio down for a few months in 1953 (during which time Jones worked for Disney), but the studio’s productions never lost their sense of continuity. The series stars carried on as before, all of them by now owing much to Jones’s input

People often assume, erroneously, that Jones created Bugs Bunny. In fact, Avery created the little gray rabbit. But the Bugs we know today would not have been the same sans Jones. The same might be said of Clampett and Freleng, but it can be argued that the Jones variant of Bugs is the definitive one. Jones’s extravaganza, What’s Opera, Doc (1957), the greatest of all Bugs cartoons, and possibly the greatest commercial animated short of all time, compresses Wagner’s Ring cycle into an ecstatically hilarious, marvellously inventive seven-minute homage (and homage it is, as well as parody). Jones played an equally important role in the evolution of characters like Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd and especially Daffy Duck, with whom he seems to have shared a particular affinity.

Jones also created new series characters. Some of these, like the mouse Sniffles, are now largely forgotten (although the Sniffles cartoons possess great charm, and are worth seeking out). Others shine among the supernovae of animation’s galaxy, most notably Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, who debuted in Fast and Furry-ous (1949).

In the Coyote/Road Runner shorts Jones seemed to strip the art of the cartoon right down to its basics, focusing everything on the tightly packed gags. In fact, however, the shorts depend two things: their amazing inventiveness and the especially strong character animation of the obsessional Wile E. Coyote. As Jones often remarked, if Coyote weren’t obsessed with Road Runner the shorts would still work because he’d be obsessed with something else. Although memory may dismiss the Coyote/Road shorts as repetitive, drawing on the same limited armory of gag elements, the shorts themselves prove otherwise. The 18-minute compilation of highlights at the end of The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie (1979) is unflaggingly, nerve-shatteringly, rib-breakingly entertaining.

Another great series character, the amorous caricature-French-lover skunk Pepe Le Pew, debuted in Odor-able Kitty (1945). (One could argue that Tex Avery “borrowed” him for the 1948 MGM short Little Tinker. The accolade probably delighted the still-youngish Jones.) Marvin Martian, who debuted in Haredevil Hare (1948), became another highly successful Jones creation, enjoying his finest hour (well, six minutes) in Duck Dodgers in the 24.5th Century (1953).

Warner finally closed down its animation studio in 1962, although Jones remained under contract to Warner’s until the end of his life. With Les Goldman, Jones started Tower 12 Productions, primarily to produce shorts for MGM. Tower 21 focused on Tom & Jerry cartoons, following in the footsteps of television animation pioneers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Jones was later quite deprecatory concerning his contributions to the Tom & Jerry canon. Although quite right in declaring himself less than ideally suited to the characters at that point in time, Jones underestimates the quality of his work with the characters.

Also in 1962, Jones founded, with his daughter and lifelong best buddy Linda (now Linda Clough), Chuck Jones Enterprises (CJE). Although mainly created to produce animation for TV, one CJE division, Chuck Jones Productions, concentrates on theatrical cartoons. Chuck Jones Productions provided the animated sections of features like the technofantasy Stay Tuned (1992) and the mainstream Robin Williams vehicle Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), not to mention the animated title sequence of Gremlins 2 — The New Batch (1990).

Earlier Jones directed the animated/live-action feature The Phantom Tollbooth (1969), based on the 1962 Norbert Juster novel. Television work done through CJE included The Cricket in Times Square (1973) and its sequels; the Kipling adaptation Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975) and its sequels; A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court (1978), featuring Bugs; and two specials featuring Raggedy Ann and Andy, The Great Santa Claus Caper (1978) and The Pumpkin who Couldn’t Smile (1979). Also for TV, Jones coproduced Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat (1971) and finished the classic Richard Williams special Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1971). In conjunction with his first wife Dorothy, Jones wrote the animated feature Gay Purr-ee (1962).

But the most famous of his post-Warner works is undoubtedly the TV special Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966), done in conjunction with his old friend Seuss (Theodore Geisel). The two met while working together on propaganda movies during World War II. (Jones, lest it be forgotten, directed 12 of Warner’s 26 wartime Private Snafu training cartoons.) Jones’s love of the English language comes through loud and clear in this featurette, while the matching of the animation with the Boris Karloff narration of Seuss’s verse lifts the movie from the excellent to the truly exceptional.

During the 1990s Jones’s output still didn’t much let up. Besides the feature-movie work mentioned above, there were Another Froggy Evening (1995), From Hare to Eternity (1996), Superior Duck (1996), Pullet Surprise (1997) and Father of the Bird (1997). He was the subject of the documentaries Chuck Amuck: The Movie (1989), Chuck Jones — A Life of Animation (1991), Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens (2000) and others. Jones also wrote books including Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (1989) and Chuck Reducks: Drawings from the Fun Side of Life (1996). A book of his fine art was in the planning stages at the time of his death.

Jones received an Honorary Oscar in 1996 for Lifetime Achievement. The Directors Guild of America recognized him with an Honorary Life Membership. Solo exhibitions of his art have been held in venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1985) and the Capitol Children’s Museum National Center for Animation in Washington D.C. (1995). In 1992, the US National Film Registry inducted What’s Opera Doc?, declaring it “among the most culturally, historically and aesthetically significant films of our time.” Jones also received other awards and recognitions far too numerous to list.

In late 1999, Jones set about establishing the Chuck Jones Foundation to promote animation and animation scholarship. He is survived by a very extensive family, including no fewer than six great grandchildren. (His running joke was that they could call him “great grandfather” as long as they put a comma after the “great.”) He is also survived by legions who regarded him as a good and steadfast friend, and by millions around the world who never met him but still felt as if they knew and loved him. All deeply mourn his passing.

John Grant

John Grant/Paul Barnett is author of over 60 books, Consultant Editor to AAPPL and US Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus. His most recent novels are The Far-Enough Window, from BeWrite, and The Dragons of Manhattan, currently being serialized in Argosy. His collaboration with artist Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge, nominated for a 2003 Hugo Award, was followed in 2005 by The Stardragons. His most recent major nonfiction is The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective, with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville. His story collection Take No Prisoners was released by Willowgate Press in August 2004. He has won the Hugo (twice), World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Chesley Award, Mythopoeic Society Award, J. Lloyd Eaton Award, and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. He is married to Pamela D. Scoville, Director of the Animation Art Guild; they live in New Jersey with four cats and not enough bookshelves.