Noah Rosenfeld
Animation – Chuck Jones research paper
In his 90-year life span, Chuck Jones could be considered, along with Walt Disney, the most influential cartoonist during the “golden age” of animation. (He has been described as the most influential individual in the history of animated film.) Walt Disney was a necessary and decisive figure for the history of commercial cartoons, and created globally-recognized icons such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. In terms of lasting popular lovability, Jones’ characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck would likely win in a contest. Jones probably has no peer as a creator of widely recognized, intimately recalled, plus highly specific cartoon characters.1
“Animation isn’t the illusion of life; it is life,” said the legendary American animator/director. He was born on September 21, 1912 in Spokane, Washington, and grew up in Hollywood. There, as he worked as a child extra in Mack Sennett comedies, he had the opportunity to study Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He died at the age of 89, in his California home on February 22, 2002.2
Unhappy in high school, his father took him out and placed him in the Chouinard art school, now the California Institute of Art. He was always an advanced reader and a huge fan of Mark Twain, which would later contribute to the literary quality of his animation.3
His first job was in Disney studios; he was only a cel washer for animator Ubbe Iwerks, but there he was exposed to the Disney style. In 1936, he moved onto the Leon Schlesinger Studio, where he had responsibility as an actual animator. (As head honcho of the Warners animation department, Schlesinger nurtured the careers of at least four highly distinguished animators- Freleng, Avery, Clampett, and Jones.)4
Later, when the Leon Schlesinger Studio was sold to Warner Bros, he was assigned to Tex Avery’s animation unit. This Warner Bros. team made Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies in a back-lot building that was nicknamed “Termite Terrace”. It was there that the characteristics and personalities of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck were created and produced.5
The Night Watchmen, which was released in 1938, was the first animated film that Chuck Jones directed at the age of 25. As director, he timed the picture, finalized all the writing, produced more than 300 layouts, and directed the art design, sound effects, music, and animation. The cartoon was 6 minutes and used up to 5,000 drawings.6
World War II brought Jones some new and different opportunities. He directed army training films with a popular 1940s character named Private SNAFU, and he worked on a political re-election film for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He became head of his own unit at Warner Bros. Animation until it closed in 1962. Jones’ exclusive contract with Warner Bros was terminated when he and his wife Dorothy wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Gay Purr-ee, since UPA produced it and was in violation of his contract with Warner Bros. He then moved to MGM Studios, where he created new episodes for the Tom & Jerry series. While there, he also produced, co-directed, and co-wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed full-length feature The Phantom Tollbooth, and directed the Academy Award-winning film The Dot and the Line.7
In 1966, he directed Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It has endured to today as one of the most favored holiday television specials ever produced. He won a Peabody award for Television Program Excellence for his work on How the Grinch Stole Christmas as well as Horton Hears a Who, also by Dr. Seuss. For a year, he worked as vice president of the American Broadcasting Company to improve children’s programming in 1972. Ironically, Jones himself stated that if he were to try writing a cartoon “for children” or for any particular market, he wouldn’t know where to start.8
Chuck Jones was known as being a true icon of creativity for creating mini-epics; a classic example being 1957’s “What’s Opera, Doc?”. This cartoon was included into the National Film Registry for being “among the most culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films of our time”. When his cartoon Duck Amuck was added to the registry, he became the only director to have 2 animated shorts among the 275 that were listed at the time.9
He has made over 300 animated films in a career spanning more than 60 years, and has earned four Academy Awards, three Honorary Doctorates, and the Director’s Guild of America’s Honorary Life Membership Award. Jones is also the world’s most widely collected animation artist. His 1989 autobiography Chuck Amuck was published in paperback in 1990, both in the US and abroad. His work has also been exhibited at over 250 galleries and museums.10
In the late 1930s when Jones was first starting out at the Leon Schlesinger Studio, his early cartoons imitated Walt Disney's shorts (especially with such cartoons as "Tom Thumb in Trouble" and the Sniffles cartoons). His earliest cartoons were highly Disney-influenced and “cutesy”, something that he broke away from, and broke away from traditional animation conventions with the cartoon "The Dover Boys" in 1942. Jones credits this cartoon as the film where he "learned how to be funny," and started developing his brand of wackiness and edginess. (He also had not been educated at the Chaplin studios in the art of comedic timing before that point.) "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.11 He really utilized clarity of timing and posing in this early work, a skill that is displayed in later Jones cartoons.
For example, a Jones cartoon that displays the virtues of extreme stylization is Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century (1953). Jones’ imagination regarding navigation through space and floating constructions of the space port was advanced, considering the moon hadn’t even been landed on. Also, the disintegration-proof vest (and disintegrating gun that actually disintegrates itself instead of the target), etc. showcased his use of creative irony.
Jones has used particular visual tools such as abstract backgrounds, to aid in creating the mood of a scenery.12 Sometimes the background will change with the mindset of a character, for example a character starting to appear more and more insane might alter a background’s pattern. He also has used (more often) something called smear drawings, to animate the illusion of a character moving very quickly. This is an effect in which a character has one starting pose and an ending pose- and within about 3 frames, the drawing of the character would be “smeared” as opposed to animating a walking cycle, or maybe even simply warping instantly from one area to the other.
According to Jones, each of his characters, such as Pepe Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Wil E. Coyote and the Roadrunner all embodied some “despicable neurosis or some impossibly noble aspiration” from his personal experience.13 The fact that he draws the separate character’s personalities from his own self allows for more intimately skilled character creation. Once briefly a comic relief character in the beginning, Daffy Duck quickly became a vain, egomaniacal prima donna trying to steal the spotlight from Bugs Bunny, who always gets the spotlight without trying and is claimed to have a Jungian “ENTP” personality. Jones has stated “Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.”14
Jones’ use of humor and intuitive understanding of human psychology is what connects his characters to his viewers probably forever. For example, Wil E. Coyote, after chasing the Roadrunner, finds himself over the edge of a cliff. However, he doesn’t begin to fall physically until he realizes and understands that he has no ground beneath him. The physical reality lags behind mental understanding. Another example is the now iconic “duck season vs. rabbit season” argument between Bugs and Daffy (which Daffy once refers to as “pronoun trouble”).15 It’s the hyper-competitive nature of Daffy which is his undoing. He pays no attention to the substance of what he says, and is instead intent on saying just the opposite of what Bugs says. Bugs tricks him into arguing to hunter Elmer Fudd that it’s duck season, and Daffy consequently gets shot in the face (only resulting in his beak doing 360-degree turns around his head, due to the invincible and extreme-slapstick-allowing nature of Jones’ cartoon characters). This is a fundamental concept of the physical world of his cartoons; he scraps traditional rules of physics to skyrocket the availability for comical opportunities like this to happen.
Ray Bradbury, at his 55th birthday party, was asked who he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied “I want to be 14 years old, like Chuck Jones. Perhaps that will be my most apt Epitaph.”16 And perhaps Chuck Jones’ as well.
Footnotes:
2. Ibid.
4. Schaffer, Ibid.
5. Schaffer, Ibid.
6. Schaffer, Ibid.
Sources:
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