Chuck Jones
About
Biography
Filmography
Family & Companions
Bibliography
Notes
Jones was billed as Charles M. Jones until the mid-1950s.
"These cartoons were never made for children. Nor were they made for adults. They were made for ME." --Chuck Jones, quoted in "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons" by Leonard Maltin (NY: Plume, 1987).
Biography
As one of the chief animators and directors during the golden age of Warner Bros. animation, Chuck Jones forged a legacy as being the creator of some of the funniest and most beautifully designed cartoons ever produced by the Hollywood studio system. Alongside Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng, Jones spearheaded the innovative and wildly popular cartoons that populated the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies worlds. With such iconic characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd, the cartoons were irreverent comedies that broke new ground and rankled future generations, which often sought to censor re-airings on television for violence and racial stereotypes. For his part, Jones was responsible for some of the most famous cartoons, directing such popular ones as "Hare-Raising Hare" (1946), "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953), "Baby Buggy Bunny" (1954) and "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957), widely considered to be the greatest cartoon ever made. He also was the creator of several characters, including Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. After being let go from Warner Bros. in the early 1960s, Jones revived the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons before serving as an independent producer on a number of made-for-television movies. Both unpretentious and self-conscious, Jones' animation mastery during the 1940s and 1950s was unparalleled, and cemented his place as an innovative contrarian.
Born on Sept. 21, 1912 in Spokane, WA, Jones was raised by his father, Charles, an unsuccessful businessman who authored the cookbook Fifty Ways to Serve Avocados, and his mother, Mabel. When he was a child, Jones moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he began appearing as an extra in silent films shot near his home. A high school dropout, Jones enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute in Pasadena - later known as the California Institute of the Arts - when he was 15 years old, and graduated without feeling secure about his drawing abilities. He found work in a commercial art studio but found himself unsuited to the job, and left to take a job as a cel washer at the Ub Iwerks Studio, which at the time was producing "Flip the Frog" cartoons. He progressively moved up the ranks, becoming a cel-painter, cel-inker and assistant animator before being fired by Iwerks. Jones worked briefly as an assistant animator for producers Charles Mintz and Walter Lantz before being rehired by the Iwerks studio, only to be fired again by Iwerks secretary Dorothy Webster, whom he married in 1936.
Jones found a job as a seaman on a large schooner, only to see the ship be destroyed by fire. He subsequently began working as puppeteer and portrait painter in a bohemian part of Los Angeles, before the future Mrs. Jones obtained him a job as an assistant animator with Leon Schlesinger Productions, the animation unit at Warner Bros., in 1933. The animation producing team of Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising had recently departed and Schlesinger was building his own unit. Jones was promoted to animator in 1934 and worked on several cartoons helmed by Friz Freleng and others before being assigned with Clampett to Tex Avery's unit at Termite Terrace, the nickname for the bungalow on the Warner lot where the animators worked. With this astonishing assemblage of talent, which first collaborated on the epochal "Golddiggers of '49" (1936), Avery's first cartoon for Warner Bros., a new era in cartoon history had begun. Jones and Bob Clampett were briefly loaned out to the faltering Iwerks studio to work as co-directors on two entries in the Gabby Goat series. Soon after their return, Clampett was promoted to director and Jones became his animator. Jones graduated to directing in 1938, when Frank Tashlin left Warner Bros.
Jones' early directorial efforts owed a strong debt to Walt Disney in both style and subject matter; the cartoons typically featured a small, quiet character in a large, forbidding environment. His first was "The Night Watchman" (1938), which told the story of a kitten who fills in for his ailing father as the regular night watchman of the house. His first original character of note was Sniffles, a talkative little mouse clad in a porkpie hat and scarf, who debuted in "Naughty but Mice" (1939) and appeared in several more cartoons before being retired in 1947. Other early highlights included an odd series of five cartoons starring Inki, a little stereotyped "African" in his topknot. These dreamy dialogue-less adventures tended to concern Inki's tumultuous efforts to hunt a lion, as showcased in "Little Lion Hunter" (1939), "Inki and the Lion" (1941) and "Inki and the Mynah Bird" (1943). While some of Jones' early films were charming, others were cloying, but they often tended to be beautifully crafted. By his own admission, his efforts lacked a sense of humor, and it would take him some time to display the sassy irreverence and skillful comic timing that would eventually characterize his best work.
Working with the characters that would make him an animation legend, Jones directed the second and third appearances of the prototypical Bugs Bunny in "Prest-o Change-o" (1939) and "Elmer's Candid Camera" (1940), which starred Merrie Melodies star Elmer Fudd (voiced by Mel Blanc). Tex Avery would finally crystallize the rabbit's personality later in "A Wild Hare" (1940), and once he had a firm grip on the character, Jones became one of the best directors of the character, as clearly evidenced by the time of the classic "Case of the Missing Hare" (1942). Jones was the driving force behind a number of other popular Bugs Bunny cartoons, including "Hare-Raising Hare" (1946), in which Bugs is pitted against a Peter Lorre-like mad scientist and a large, orange-haired, sneaker-clad monster; "Baby Buggy Bunny" (1954), in which the foundling Bugs takes into his care is actually the notorious gangster Babyface Finster; and "Bully for Bugs" (1953) in which he accidentally burrows into a Spanish bullring - uttering the classic line "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!" - and tangles with an angry bull.
Under Jones's direction, another popular Merrie Melodies character, Daffy Duck, was portrayed as a cowardly self-preservationist continually undone by his own greed or selfishness. Jones' trilogy of cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd - "Rabbit Fire" (1951), "Rabbit Seasoning" (1952) and "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" (1953) - were masterfully subtle and imaginative examples of character animation as the three very different personalities interacted in a variety of situations involving hunting and whether it was truly rabbit season or duck season. Jones also derived much comic mileage from placing Daffy in wildly incongruous settings such as in "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" (1950), "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953) and "Robin Hood Daffy" (1958). This tendency was amplified to a nearly cosmic degree in "Duck Amuck" (1953), a classic example of reflexivity in cinema, in which Daffy was explicitly presented as an animated figure tormented by a mostly off-screen animator.
Jones won Warner Bros. an Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject with "For Scent-imental Reasons" (1949), which starred one of his most popular creations, the amorous French skunk Pepe Le Pew. The formula for these cartoons was fairly rigid: a female cat somehow has a streak of paint drawn down the middle of her back and Pepe mistakes her for another skunk. Immediately smitten with love, he pursues her while being totally oblivious of her revulsion to his odor. Jones created an even more minimalist situation for his most successful creation, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote series. The formula was totally inflexible: each cartoon was set in the desert; the Coyote always chased the Road Runner, whom he never caught; the Coyote was always done in by his own efforts; and the characters never spoke. At their best, they had an absurdist, existential quality, as on display in "Hook, Line and Stinker" (1958), "Hip Hip-Hurry!" (1959), and "Hopalong Casualty" (1960). In later episodes, the Coyote sought outside help to further his goal of capturing the Roadrunner, with the hapless canine generally ordering elaborate, but dysfunctional devices from the ACME Corporation which invariably betrayed his naive faith in them.
In addition to working with an impressive stable of continuing characters, Jones also excelled at one-shot cartoons. The most celebrated example might well have been "One Froggy Evening" (1955), an unsettling allegory about a singing frog. Retrospectively christened Michigan J. Frog, the character became the symbol of Warner Brothers' WB Network in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, many fans, historians and fellow animators believed that Jones achieved his masterpiece with "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957) which miraculously condensed Wagner's 14-hour "Der Ring des Nibelungun" into a classic six-minute cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The extraordinarily lavish spoof of opera required 106 shots whereas a typical cartoon used around 60. Also a wicked parody of Disney's "Fantasia" (1940), background artist Maurice Noble's monumental designs and melodramatically theatrical color schemes were unlike anything previously seen in a Warner Brothers cartoon. "What's Opera, Doc?" wittily analyzed the long-running battle between Elmer and Bugs, and recast it in larger-than-life terms complete with original songs and a hilariously animated ballet. In 1992, the film was justly selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, while it was voted by 1,000 animators as being the greatest cartoon of all time.
After being fired from Warner Bros. due to violating his contract in writing the animated feature "Gay Purr-ee" (1962), Jones went to MGM where he produced and directed a memorable series of "Tom and Jerry" cartoons from 1963-67, while forming his own company, Tower 12 Productions, with producer Les Goldman. He redesigned both Tom and Jerry in a style that was reminiscent of his days at Warner Bros., while also utilizing many of the sight gags he mastered there, particularly with the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartons. The cartoons were a mixed bag, with some recapturing the magic of the old Hanna-Barbera efforts, but the studio ultimately pulled the plug. Jones subsequently kept working through his own production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises, primarily on TV specials like "Dr. Seuss' 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas'" (CBS, 1966) and "Dr. Seuss' 'The Cat in the Hat'" (CBS, 1971). Back in the feature world, he produced, co-wrote and co-directed with Abe Levitow the cartoon portion of the film version of Norton Juster's book, "The Phantom Tollbooth" (1969). In 1970, he began producing projects for ABC under his Chuck Jones Productions banner, including "The Curiosity Shop" (ABC, 1971) and "The Cricket in Times Square" (ABC, 1973), before heading back to CBS for "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (1975).
After co-directing "The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie" (1979) and serving as an uncredited creative assistant on Steven Spielberg's "1941" (1979), Jones settled into a semi-retirement in which he lectured, led workshops, painted and received numerous awards, tributes and accolades. He made cameo appearances in "Gremlins" (1984) and "Innerspace" (1987), and was an animation consultant on Roger Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988). Following work as an animation writer and director for Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990), he signed a deal with Warner Bros. to produce and direct new animated shorts featuring classic as well as possibly new characters. He went on to make "Chariots of Fur" (1994), a new Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon that was produced and directed by the 82-year-old Jones. The following year, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was given an honorary Oscar at the 1996 Academy Awards. In 2000, he created the new cartoon character, Thomas T. Wolk (aka Timber Wolf), which was featured in 13 shorts that were released online. Just two years later, on Feb. 22, 2002, Jones died from heart failure at the age of 89.
By Shawn Dwyer
Filmography
Director (Feature Film)
Cast (Feature Film)
Writer (Feature Film)
Producer (Feature Film)
Animation (Feature Film)
Production Companies (Feature Film)
Misc. Crew (Feature Film)
Director (Special)
Cast (Special)
Animation (Special)
Director (Short)
Director (TV Mini-Series)
Writer (TV Mini-Series)
Producer (TV Mini-Series)
Visual Effects (TV Mini-Series)
Animation (TV Mini-Series)
Misc. Crew (TV Mini-Series)
Life Events
1930
After art school, found work in a commercial art studio
1931
Hired as a cel-washer by the Ub Iwerks Studio which was then producing Flip the Frog cartoons
1933
Dorothy Webster obtained a job for Jones as an in-betweener at Leon Schlesinger Productions (date approximate)
1934
Promoted to animator
1936
Shared animator credit with Clampett on "Gold Diggers of '49", the first cartoon helmed by Avery at Warner Brothers
1938
Directing debut, "The Night Watchman"
1939
Introduced Sniffles, a cute little mouse, in "Naughty But Mice"; Jones' first original character
1939
Directed "Prest-o Change-o", the second appearance of the prototype Bugs Bunny as a magician's rabbit who bedazzles the Two Curious Puppies
1939
Directed his first cartoon featuring Porky Pig, the patriotic "Old Glory"; marked the character's first appearance in color; notable as the studio's first completely serious cartoon
1940
Directed the third cartoon featuring the prototypical Bugs Bunny, "Elmer's Candid Camera"; most important for its revision of the character of Elmer Fudd
1941
Became deeply involved in the animators' strike at the Walt Disney studio
1942
Based the staging of his animated short "Conrad the Sailor" on the writings of Soviet filmmaker/theoretician Sergei Eisenstein
1942
Directed "The Dover Boys", an influential Warner Brothers cartoon that influenced the style, method and timing for the acclaimed cartoons to follow from UPA (United Productions of America) in the 1940s and 50s
1944
Working nights without compensation, directed "Hell Bent for Election" in support of Franklin D Roosevelt's re-election; the first full-length UPA short; worked with a crew of other moonlighters
1945
Introduced the amorous French skunk Pepe Le Pew in "Odor-able Kitty"
1946
Began publishing articles on the art of animation (date approximate)
1946
Began his most productive era as a Warner Brothers animation director
1948
Introduced the Little Man from Mars (aka Commander X-2; aka Marvin the Martian) in "Haredevil Hare"
1949
Directed the landmark cartoon "Fast and Furry-ous" which introduced the Road Runner and (subsequently named Wile E.) Coyote, his most successful Warners creations
1949
Directed Pepe Le Pew in "For Scent-imental Reasons", the second Warners cartoon to win the Oscar for best animated short subject
1950
Directed and co-scripted (with Friz Freleng) "So Much for So Little", an animated documentary short on the importance of sanitation and health services commissioned by the Public Health Service; first cartoon to win the Oscar for best documentary short subject
1953
Directed one of his most celebrated cartoons, "Duck Amuck", in which Daffy Duck is tormented by a (mostly) off-screen animator
1953
Directed the classic Cold War satire, "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century", starring Daffy, Porky and the Little Man from Mars
1954
Directed the only "3-D" Warner Brothers cartoon, "Lumberjack Rabbit"
1954
Left Warners for a period when Jack Warner--thinking that "3-D" would sweep the industry and drive up costs--closed the animation unit
1954
Worked briefly as a gag writer at Walter Lantz Studio
1955
Worked for four months at the Walt Disney Studio after Jack Warner temporarily closed the animation unit at Warner Brothers; worked uncredited on Disney's "Sleeping Beauty"
1955
Directed his most celebrated "one-shot" cartoon, "One Froggy Evening", an unsettling allegory about a singing frog
1957
Directed "What's Opera, Doc?", an acclaimed parodic condensation of Wagner's 14-hour "Der Ring des Nibelungen" into a classic six-minute cartoon
1962
Feature screenwriting debut (with wife Dorothy Webster Jones), wrote screenplay for the UPA feature "Gay Purr-ee"
1962
Established an independent production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises
1963
Formed Tower 12 Productions (with producer Les Goldman)
1966
Named head of department
1969
Feature debut as producer-director, "The Phantom Tollbooth" (also co-wrote screenplay; directed animated sequences with Abe Levitow)
1970
Named vice president in charge of Children's Programming at ABC
1979
Co-directed (with Phil Monroe) and co-scripted (with Michael Maltese) "The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie"
1979
Served as an uncredited creative assistant on Steven Spielberg's "1941"
1984
Made a cameo appearance as Mr. Jones in Joe Dante's "Gremlins"
1987
Made a cameo appearance as a supermarket customer in Dante's "Innerspace"
1988
Served as an animation consultant on Robert Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"
1990
Worked as an animation writer and director for a sequence in Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (also made a cameo appearance)
1992
"What's Opera, Doc?" selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry
1992
Served as animation director on the Robocat sequence of the comedy fantasy "Stay Tuned"
1992
Profiled in the feature-length documentary "The Magical World of Chuck Jones" directed by George Daugherty and featuring interviews with the likes of Spielberg, Dante, George Lucas, Matt Groening and Friz Freleng
1993
Signed a deal with Warner Bros. to produce and direct animated shorts featuring "classic" (as well as possibly new) Warners characters for theatrical release
1994
Produced and directed "Chariots of Fur", his first short under his deal at Warners (released with the feature "Richie Rich")
1994
Subject of a career retrospective at NYC's American Museum of the Moving Image entitled "Chuck Amuck: The Cartoons of Chuck Jones"
1995
Received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
1995
Served as a creative consultant on the animated title sequence of "Four Rooms", a comedy anthology feature
2000
Created new cartoon character Thomas T Wolk (aka Timber Wolf) for Warner Bros. Online and the Internet site Entertaindom; with partner Stephen Fossati, created 13 short films featuring the character
2000
Was subject of TV documentary "Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, A Life in Animation" (PBS)
Videos
Movie Clip
Trailer
Family
Companions
Bibliography
Notes
Jones was billed as Charles M. Jones until the mid-1950s.
"These cartoons were never made for children. Nor were they made for adults. They were made for ME." --Chuck Jones, quoted in "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons" by Leonard Maltin (NY: Plume, 1987).
"All that I am and all that I hope to be, I owe to Chuck Jones!" --Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss (from a signed drawing included in "Chuck Amuck")
Jones and Dr. Seuss collaborated on two animated TV specials entitled "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (CBS, 1966) and "Horton Hears a Who" (CBS, 1970) which won the Peabody Award for Television Programming Excellence.
"The difference between what we did at Warner Bros. and what's on Saturday morning is the difference between animation and what I call illustrated radio. For Saturday morning, they make a full radio track and then use as few drawings as possible in front of it.""The best way to tell the difference is this: if you can turn off the picture and know what's going on, that's illustrated radio. But if you can turn off the sound and know what's going on, that's animation." --Chuck Jones (Quoted in "That's All Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation" by Steve Scheider (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1988)
"In 1962 I established my own independent production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises. Chuck Jones Enterprises produced nine half-hour prime-time television specials, all produced, written, and directed by me. They are: "The Cricket in Times Square", "A Very Merry Cricket", and "Yankee Doodle Cricket" (for ABC); three stories from Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book"--"Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", "Mowgli's Brothers" (both of which received the Parents' Choice Awards in 1985) and "The White Seal" (for CBS); two specials populated by some of the classic characters from Warner Bros., "Carnival of the Animals" ... and "A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court" ... Both were aired on CBS. Also for CBS: "Raggedy Ann and Andy in: The Great Santa Claus Caper", and "The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile" ..." --From "Chuck Amuck" by Chuck Jones (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989)
Jones is a Regents Lecturer at the University of California at La Jolla and Visiting Lecturer at Cambridge University, England, and Guardian Lecturer in England.
Jones has lectured and conducted workshops at Stanford University, the University of Kansas, the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins, the Universities of California and Nevada, San Francisco State College, Art Center Ccollege of Design in Pasadena, Cal Arts, USC, UCLA, and many others.
The University of California at Santa Cruz offered an accredited course on the films of Chuck Jones, under the direction of Tim Hunter.
Jones has been honored with a three-day retrospective at London's British Film Institute, twice at the Kennedy Film Center and by the American Film Institute. He has also received tributes in Toronto, Zagreb and Montreal.
"I don't want to criticize. I'm SORRY that people who are as good as Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera once were are not doing the kinds of things they are capable of. I'm sorry that Friz [Freleng] isn't doing the kinds of things he's capable of. I'm sorry I'm not, for that matter, but at least I'm not doing that kind of crap."--From "Chuck Jones Interviewed" by Joe Adamson in "The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology", edited by Gerald Peary and Danny Peary (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1980).
"Perhaps the most accurate remark about me was uttered by Ray Bradbury at his fifty-fifth birthday party. In answer to the usual question: 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Ray replied: 'I want to be fourteen years old like Chuck Jones.'""Perhaps this will be my most apt possible epitaph."--From "Chuck Amuck" by Chuck Jones.
