The Creator - Chuck Jones

Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. 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), Duck Amuck (1952) (both later inducted into the National Film Registry) and Jones' famous "Hunter's Trilogy" of Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (1951–1953), establishing himself as an important innovator and storyteller.

Biography

[edit] 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 animator at the Walter Lantz studio. While at Iwerks, he met a cel painter named Dorothy Webster, who would later become his wife.


[edit] 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. In 1935, he was promoted to animator, and assigned to work with new Schlesinger director Tex Avery. There was no room for the new Avery unit in Schlesinger's small studio, so Avery, Jones, and fellow animators Bob Clampett, Virgil Ross, and Sid Sutherland were moved into a small adjacent building they dubbed "Termite Terrace". When Clampett was promoted to director in 1937, Jones was assigned to his unit; the Clampett unit were briefly assigned to work with Jones' old employer, Ub Iwerks, when Iwerks subcontracted four cartoons to Schlesinger in 1937. Jones became 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 Schleinger 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 (also known as 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, Pepe 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 animators Ken Harris and Ben Washam.

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.


[edit] 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 1964, Sib Tower 12 was absorbed by MGM and was renamed MGM Animation/Visual Arts. Jones' 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. 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.

MGM closed the animation division in 1970, and Jones once again started his own studio, 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. The 1979 movie The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie was a compilation of Jones' best theatrical shorts; Jones produced new Road Runner shorts for The Electric Company series and Bugs Bunny's Looney Christmas Tales (1979), and even newer shorts were made for Bugs Bunny's Bustin' Out All Over (1980).


[edit] 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 his death in 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". He made a cameo appearance in the 1984 film Gremlins and directed the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck animated sequences that bookend Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Jones also directed animated sequences various features such as a lengthy sequence in the 1992 film, Stay Tuned and a shorter one 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 animation throughout the 20th century. He received an honorary degree from Oglethorpe University in 1993.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Chuck Jones has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7011 Hollywood Blvd.

Jones, who had been nominated 8 times over his career for an Oscar (winning twice), received an Honorary Academy Award in 1996 by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for "the creation of classic cartoons and cartoon characters whose animated lives have brought joy to our real ones for more than half a century."

Jones died of heart failure in 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, Bob McKimson, Rudy Ising, Hugh Harman, Milt Franklyn, Frank Tashlin, Arthur Davis, and Carl W. Stalling had all died before Jones.

Jones' seven decades of artwork is living on into the 21st Century though major cartoon networks all around the world, as well as via the internet