Chuck Amuck Jones

(Charles Martin Jones)
Born: September 21, 1912, Spokane, Washington, USA.
to February 22, 2002, Corona Del Mar, California, USA.
MASTER OF CHARACTER ANIMATION
Chuck Jones can be plausibly described as the most influential individual in the history of animated film. There are other possible candidates for this title, particularly Walt Disney, whose role in developing full animation as integrated industrial/marketing process was certainly decisive for the history of commercial cartoons, providing a nearly universal model (even for those, like Jones himself, who would eventually reproduce the Disney style only in order to parody it). Soon it will also be evident that John Lasseter, the unrivalled pioneer of CGI characterisation, should also be considered for this title. There are yet other possibilities in various contexts (Cohl, McCay, McLaren, Tezuka, Groening). As a creator of globally recognised, intimately recalled, yet highly specific cartoon characters, however, Jones probably has no peer. As directed by Jones, I suspect Daffy and Bugs could punch out Mickey and Donald in any brawl over lasting popular loveability - even if, when this almost happens in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis and Williams, 1988), it seems to be more the Avery version of these characters that is at stake.
Duck Amuck
The continuing international currency of Jones' work may be directly observed, to cite just one item of evidence, in the fact that Marvin the Martian, numerically a marginal member of the Warner Brothers universe, seems to have invaded more young human bodies in the last few decades (by way of T-shirts) than any other single icon of global youth marketing.
It is not primarily on our chests, however, but in our hearts, that Marvin threatens to live forever, despite having appeared in (to my knowledge) a mere three cartoons. On one level, a Jones character is just a flat and superficial thing, like any animated drawing, but it somehow finds a unique response in the depths of human memory, precisely, I think, in the way it lives with the impossibility of its own life. Daffy, in fact, is never more himself than at the moment that Jones lets Bugs rub out Daffy's world altogether in the famously 'deconstructive' (even Leonard Maltin puts it that way!) Duck Amuck (1953):What I want to say is that Daffy can live and struggle on in an empty screen, without setting and without sound, just as well as with a lot of arbitrary props. He remains Daffy. (1)Jones was not, of course, the pure author of his own fate, no matter how he toyed with the lives of his characters. As he constantly acknowledged, there was a lot of luck involved, as well as quite a lot guidance through osmosis. Above all, Jones was a true child of Hollywood. Although born elsewhere, he was brought up on the Sunset strip, where he was able to absorb fundamental lessons in comic timing from the nearby Chaplin studios, and it was there too, within the protecting yet notoriously porous confines of 'termite terrace', that most of his beloved characters would come to life. What's Opera, Doc? Having gone through the phases of animatic initiation, starting as a cel washer for Ub Iwerks (another candidate for our 'most important' title) and learning to animate under Tex Avery, Jones eventually began to direct his own cartoons at Warner Brother's unkempt animation division (initially a separate company known simply as Leon Schlesinger Productions). Here it is important to note the strange and paradoxical role played by Leon Schlesinger in the history of cartoons. As head honcho of the Warners animation department, Schlesinger nurtured the careers of at least four highly distinguished and distinct auteurs of animation: Freleng, Avery, Clampett, and Jones himself. He did so, however, through the rigorous practice of complete indifference to the art of cartoons, which he viewed purely and simply as a business. Where the Disney style was shaped by the all-reaching (if rarely actually drawing) hands of Walt Disney, the Warner Bros. 'counter-style' owes everything to the disinterest and utter disengagement of Schlesinger.
The crew at Termite Terrace discovered they could get away with trying anything (including more than one parody of the boss himself). By not giving a hoot, Schlesinger evidently created one of the most inspiring environments in which commercial cartoonists have ever had the privilege to work.The question facing all cartoonists in the late 1930s, Fleischer Studios as well as Warner Bros., was a straightforward one: how to respond to the Disney style of full animation, pioneered at first in such seven-minute classics as The Three Little Pigs (Disney, 1933), the still stunningly colourful Band Concert (Disney, 1935), and the multiplaning The Old Mill (Disney, 1937), and finally be definitively established in the feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney, 1937). For the Fleischers it would soon mean the obsolescence of their all-moving, all-pulsating rubber-pipe style of cartoon characterisation (having long ago invented the rotoscope, they would eventually develop a kind of integrated cinematic-animatic 'hyper-realism' of their own).
It was left to the artists at Warner Brothers, however, (particularly Tex Avery) to intuit that the very technical and moral 'perfection' of Disney's style called out for some kind of direct and militantly disrespectful action in response. The Warner Bros. style became inseparably a parody of Disney's aesthetic, narrative, and moral proprieties. The rules of squash and stretch would not be ignored, but made to serve quite different purposes. The bodies of Bugs and Daffy are no longer jointless, they suggest mass, gravity, skeletal structure. But different things are transpiring in these forests. Bambi delivers a weighty lesson on the finality of death and the need for duty; Bugs just keeps on sending Daffy's beak spinning ineffectually around his head, before the whole natural order is inverted and both of these anthropomorphised animals directly address the audience "be vewy, vewy qwiet .... we're hunting Elmers" (Jones' Rabbit Fire, 1951). Sniffles Takes a Trip Initially, however, Jones, much more than any of his colleagues, allowed himself to be seduced by the techniques and moods of Disney cartoons. His early Sniffles cartoons, with their rounded, innocuous forms and their pastoral, pastel tones, suggest a kind of voluntary apprenticeship in the disciplines of unrestrained 'Disneyism'. Thankfully, the 'fidelity' displayed by the young Jones is soon deflected under the influence of the pointed exaggerations, sexual aggressions and double-takes of Avery, as well as the elaborate psychodramas and animated gedanken experiments of Clampett. If the explosive, accelerated, ballistic style of Tex Avery could be described as a species of commercial 'futurism', and the deliriously introspective, speculative worlds evoked by Clampett are forms of mass 'surrealism', Jones' characterisations probably demand a more literary analogy (interestingly, the young Charles M. was withdrawn from high school and sent to Chounard Art Institute precisely because his literary tastes were far in advance of his classmates).
There is more than a touch of Kafka and the ever-persecuted 'K' in the almost anonymously named 'Chuck Jones'. In the universes created by each of these two figures of international modernity, each unrivalled in his own field of experimentation, characters constantly seem to be summoned forth in order to manifest and testify to nothing but the already ordained futility of their actions.There will certainly not be room to enumerate the many elements of Jones' irreducible style as an animatic auteur, let alone the implications of the 'whole' that emerges through and across all the singular experiments in characterisation that comprise his life's work. Any such definitive analysis, however, would need to respond, at the very least, both to his at once 'avant garde' and hard-headedly commercial use of abstracted, deliberately over-stylised backgrounds and movements, and to the logical circularity which repeatedly dictates the emotional lives of his characters.In Aristo Cat (1943), a cartoon that is, sadly, rarely seen on Australian television screens, Jones turns the background architecture into a direct and intense externalisation of a character's degenerating mental state. The lines of the wallpaper become the prisons bars of his inner madness, he is persecuted by design. At the level of economising movement, Jones is often misleadingly said to have invented 'limited animation' in The Dover Boys (1942), through the use of 'smear drawings' to evoke speed and sudden movement. If 'limited animation' refers to the standardised and abbreviated techniques of television cartoons (probably 'invented' by Hanna and Barbera for the very appropriately named Ruff and Ready show), then nothing could be further from the truth. Jones deliberately 'limits' animation here at one level, but for an entirely comic-aesthetic purpose. In one character, the decision not to 'fully animate' the body successfully evokes the form-stretching eagerness of a teenage boy. The character seems to go into a kind of 'warp drive' through the sheer power of enthusiasm, making space itself bend to his will. Far from limiting animation in any impoverishing sense, Jones here explores the full palette of animated possibilities, including those which do not involve 'full animation' in the technical sense. Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century Another Jones cartoon that displays the virtues of extreme stylisation - this time one that Australian viewers should know very well - is Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century (1953), especially in the gleaming, floating, plasticised constructions of the space port (an experiment in design taken even further when Bugs and Marvin fight over a 'space modulator' in another cartoon). It is perhaps this virtue of simplified space which Porky celebrates when he dismisses Daffy's torturous computations using a space-navigo compass, pointing out that 'planet X' is just one letter in a plainly visible alphabet structuring the entire galaxy. There is something very instructive here, also, in the tightly integrated series of futilities and inversions that determines Daffy's trajectory throughout the adventure. Who could ever forget the successfully disintegration-proof vest that just happens to leave Daffy's entire bodily substance pouring out of its interior like so much moondust out of a sieve, or Daffy's not-so-surprised exclamation when his 'disintegrating pistol' does the only thing the laws of Jones' Kafkaesque syntax could possibly allow? (Viewers interested in Jonesian semiotics may wish to further research the question of pronoun trouble.) But Daffy isn't alone in his ever-ironic fate, he just happens to strain against it with a manic and loveable stupidity matched by few other characters (except, to be sure, Wil.E Coyote). It is not just the duck, after all, who ends up clinging to a root in empty space at the end of Duck Dodgers, but Marvin and Porky, too. It is left to Porky to pronounce the telling 'b-b-b-big deal' that provides this cartoon's parting note.An adequate study of the complex processes of cross-fertilisation and mutual modulation that led to the 'parallel yet differentiated development' of such seemingly eternal characters as Bugs and Daffy at Termite Terrace is yet to be carried out. Whatever the secret of the special chemistry that prevailed for a time at Warners, however, it was evidently not to be found by Jones at MGM (a transition earlier made with great success by Avery), when he was conscripted to direct the already successful Tom and Jerry series. This sojourn proved to be neither happy nor fruitful. Rabbit of Seville More than once, Jones testified that he wouldn't even know how to begin making films 'for children', or, indeed, for any anticipated market. He could only animate for himself. He was quite candid in admitting that each of the characters invented purely by him (such as Pepe Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Wil.E.Coyote and the Roadrunner), as well as each of the characters inherited and developed by him in new directions (Daffy, Bugs, Elmer, Porky), embodied either some despicable neurosis or some impossibly noble aspiration extracted from his own experience. In Tex Avery's hands, by contrast, Daffy and Bugs seemed like differently outfitted vehicles for the release of one, all-consuming, tumescent life force. Directed by Jones, these same characters become perfectly and permanently opposed personality types. Bugs becomes the initially reluctant agent of a gracefully vengeful justice, one that is paradoxically enforced through the suspension of all apparent laws; Daffy becomes an ego in search of a character, a figure of futility, a virtual tissue of 'issues'.Like the rest of us, Chuck Jones, the man, was born at a definite date into a mortal body; one destined to die at an equally definite time and place. Unlike most of us, however, Chuck Jones, the animator, was able to isolate and revivify selected aspects of his personality, endowing them with a completely different, elasticised, effectively immortal kind of life:As you develop any character, you are, of course, looking into a mirror, a reflection of yourself, your ambitions and hopes, your realizations and fears. [....] You see, that's the whole wonder of animation directing. If you're not something you want to be, or are something you don't want to be, you can through drawing, through action, create a character who will take care of the matter. (2)Jones' characters were thus designed knowingly as virtual avatars of his own unknown life: their possibility was usually found in some intimate impossibility he would discover within himself, some fragment of himself that he would see escaping himself in the mirror. Do I risk stretching things too far (like some naive native dog tugging on an Acme rubber band), if I say that the whole 'family' of these characters seemed to constitute a kind of personalised universe for Jones, and that this universe effectively 'took care' of matter itself for him, displacing his passions from the level of merely 'real' or 'physical' existence? Every animator is, at least potentially, a cosmocrator, a master of his own virtual universe, an all-powerful creator-destroyer, and Jones seems to have been particularly (and ironically) aware of this (and not only in Duck Amuck, when Bugs the cartoon-director invisibly plays out his worst tendencies upon the flat body of poor Daffy the cartoon-actor).Any fair treatment of Jones' work would need to account for the input of his most lastingly sympatico writer, Mike Maltese. Any such treatment of the development of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as characters would need to recognise the often unexpected and formative role played by the voice artist, Mel Blanc (especially in the case of Bugs). Finally, any adequate analysis of the development of the Warner Brothers' style as a whole would need to underline the singular musical inventions of Carl Stalling.
- by Bill Schaffer
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This page is dedicated to a legend:
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones
(September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002)
An American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. He directed many of the classic short animated cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote, Pepé Le Pew and the other Warners characters, including the memorable What's Opera, Doc? (1957) and Duck Amuck (1952) (both later inducted into the National Film Registry), establishing himself as an important innovator and storyteller. Early life Jones was born in Spokane, Washington, and later moved with his parents and three siblings to the Los Angeles, California area. In his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Jones credits his artistic bent to circumstances surrounding his father, who was an unsuccessful businessman in California in the 1920s. His father, Jones recounts, would start every new business venture by purchasing new stationery and new pencils with the company name on them. When the business failed, his father would turn the useless stationery and pencils over to his children. Armed with an endless supply of high-quality paper and pencils, the children drew constantly. Jones and several of his siblings went on to artistic careers. After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute, Jones held a number of low-ranking jobs in the animation industry, including washing cels at the Ub Iwerks studio and assistant animating at the Walter Lantz studio. While at Iwerks, he met a cel painter named Dorothy Webster, who would later become his wife. Warner Bros. Jones joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, the independent studio that produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros., in 1933 as an assistant animator. During the late 1930s, he worked under directors Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, becoming a director (or "supervisor", the original title for an animation director in the studio) himself in 1938 when Frank Tashlin left the studio. Jones' first cartoon was The Night Watchman, which featured a cute kitten who would later evolve into Sniffles the mouse. Many of Jones' cartoons of the 1930s and early 1940s were lavishly animated, but audiences and fellow Termite Terrace staff members found them lacking in genuine humor. Often slow-moving and overbearing with "cuteness", Jones' early cartoons were an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Walt Disney's shorts (especially with such cartoons as Tom Thumb in Trouble and the Sniffles cartoons). Jones finally broke away from both his traditional cuteness, and traditional animation conventions as well, with the cartoon The Dover Boys in 1942. Jones credits this cartoon as the film where he "learned how to be funny." The Dover Boys is also one of the first uses of Stylized animation in American film, breaking away from the more realistic animation styles influenced by the Disney Studio. This was also the period where Jones created many of his lesser-known characters, including Charlie Dog, Hubie and Bertie, and The Three Bears. Despite their relative obscurity today, the shorts starring these characters represent some of Jones' earliest work that was strictly intended to be funny. During the World War II years, Jones worked closely with Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) to create the Private Snafu series of Army educational cartoons. Private Snafu comically educated soldiers on topics like spies and laziness in a more risque way than general audiences would have been used to at the time.
Jones would later collaborate with Seuss on a number of adaptations of Seuss' books to animated form, most importantly How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966. A still from What's Opera, Doc?.Jones hit his stride in the late 1940s, and continued to make his best-regarded works through the 1950s. Jones-created characters from this period includes Claude Cat, Marc Antony and Pussyfoot, Charlie Dog, Michigan J. Frog and his three most popular creations, Pepé LePew, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. The Road Runner cartoons, in addition to the cartoons that are considered his masterpieces (all written and conceived by Michael Maltese), Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, and What's Opera, Doc? are today hailed by critics as some of the best cartoons ever made. The staff of the Jones unit was as important to the success of these cartoons as Jones himself. Key members included writer Michael Maltese, layout artist/background designer/co-director Maurice Noble, animator and co-director Abe Levitow, and animator Ken Harris. Jones remained at Warners throughout the 1950s, except for a brief period in 1953 when Warners closed the animation studio. During this interim, Jones found employment at the Walt Disney studio, where he did four months of uncredited work on Sleeping Beauty (1959). In the early-1960s, Jones and his wife Dorothy wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Gay Purr-ee. The finished film would feature the voices of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet and Red Buttons as cats in Paris, France. The feature was produced by UPA, and Jones moonlit to work on the film, since he had an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. UPA completed the film and made it available for distribution in 1962; it was picked up by Warner Bros, who found out Jones had violated his contract and fired him from the company. Jones on his own With business partner Les Goldman, Jones started an independent animation studio, Sib Tower 12 Productions, bringing on most of his unit from Warner Bros, including Maurice Noble and Michael Maltese. In 1963, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contracted with Sib Tower 12 to have Jones and his staff produce new Tom and Jerry cartoons. In 1963, production of Tom and Jerry shorts returned to Hollywood with Chuck Jones' Sib-Tower 12 Productions; this series lasted until 1967. His animated short film The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Higher Mathematics won the 1965 Oscar for Best Animated Short. As the Tom and Jerry series wound down (it would be discontinued in 1967), Jones moved on to television. In 1966, he produced and directed the TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas, featuring the voice (and facial features) of Boris Karloff. In 1967, Sib Tower 12 was absorbed by MGM and was renamed MGM Animation Visual Arts. Jones continued to work on TV specials such as Horton Hears A Who! (1970), but his main focus during this time was the feature film The Phantom Tollbooth, which did lukewarm business when MGM released it in 1970. In the 1970s, Jones left MGM started a new production company, Chuck Jones Productions. His most notable work during this period was three animated TV adaptations of short stories from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Brothers, The White Seal and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Later years Like many modern cartoon legends, Chuck Jones never retired: he was an active artist and cartoonist up until his last weeks. Through the 1980s and 1990s (and until 2002) Jones was painting cartoon and parody art, sold through animation galleries by his daughter's company, Linda Jones Enterprises. He was also creating new cartoons for the Internet based on his new character, "Thomas Timberwolf". Jones also directed the animated sequence seen at the start of the 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire. Jones was not a fan of much contemporary animation, terming most of it, especially television cartoons such as those of Hanna-Barbera, "illustrated radio." Jones' intellectualism, writing ability, and capacity for self-analysis made him an historical authority as well as a major contributor to the development of the animation genre throughout the 20th century. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Chuck Jones has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7011 Hollywood Blvd. Chuck Jones died of congestive heart failure on February 22, 2002, at age 89. Jones' death brought down the final curtain on Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies family of creators. Mel Blanc, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson and Carl W. Stalling had all died before Jones. Influence and critical perception Jones is considered by many to be a master of characterization and timing. His best works are noted for depicting a refinement of character to the point that a single eyebrow wiggle could be a major gag as opposed to the wild, frenetic style usually associated with cartoons, and those of Warner Bros. in particular. Like Walt Disney, Jones wanted animation to gain respect from the film and art communities, and often undertook special animation projects reflecting such, including What's Opera Doc, The Dot and the Line, and the 1944 political film Hell-Bent for Re-Election, a campaign film for Franklin D. Roosevelt that he directed for UPA. In his later years, Jones became the most vocal alumnus of the Termite Terrace studio, frequently giving lectures, seminars, and working to educate newcomers in the animation field. Many of his principles, therefore, found their way back into the mainstream animation consciousness, and can be seen in films such as Cats Don't Dance, The Emperor's New Groove and Lilo & Stitch. Jones had a penchant for cuteness in his earliest days as is visible in his cartoons featuring Sniffles the Mouse. Other Warners directors, particularly Tex Avery and Robert Clampett, considered "cute" to be a four letter word. By request of producer Leon Schlesinger, Jones changed his style, and began making zanier pictures such as Wackiki Wabbit and Hare Conditioned. After Avery, Clampett, and Schlesinger left the studio, Jones gradually reincorporated elements of the slow pace, sentimentality and cuteness of his previous work with characters like Marc Antony and Pussyfoot and the young Ralph Phillips. His versions of the characters he worked with often showcased a more infantile look than other interpretations, with larger eyes and eyelashes. This is especially apparent in his Tom and Jerry films, some of which are considered the weakest in the canon. Jones, like the rest of his Termite Terrace associates after the departure of Schlesinger, has been criticized for using repetitive plots, most obvious in the Pepé Le Pew and Road Runner cartoons. It must be noted, however, that many of these films were originally issued to theatres years apart, and the repetitious factor was often done at the request of the producers, management, or theatre owners. Also, series like the Road Runner were set up as exercises in exploring the same situation in different ways. Jones had a set list of rules as to what could and could not occur in a Road Runner cartoon, and stated that it was not what happened that was important in the films, but how it happened. Chuck Jones' reinvention of certain characters is also a controversial subject. He reimagined the wacky, Clampett-esque hero Daffy Duck as a greedy, sneaky antagonist with a slow-burning temper; and the relegated hapless star Porky Pig to being a sidekick or audience-aware observer of the action. Jones also created a series of films in which he used Friz Freleng's Sylvester in the context of a real cat. Like all the Warners directors, his Bugs Bunny characterization is unique to his films: Jones' Bugs never attacks unless attacked, unlike Avery's and Clampett's bombastic rabbits. (scource @ www.wikipedia.com)