"The Art of Chuck Jones" by John Kricfalusi

 

Animation Magazine - Issue #30 July/August 1994

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Text Version:

Bob Clampett first stretched the animation medium's pure essence — "funny drawings that move funny," then added all the other artistic and technical advantages that were available to him at the time and created a new form of entertainment.

    No other medium can do the things a Clampett cartoon can do. There are emotions and entertainment possibilities cartoons can express that novels, symphonies and other forms of art can never reach. And vice-versa of course. As happens today, when the people who make the creative decisions in animation are ignorant of its workings, Clampett didn't try to bend the medium to conform to his first limited vision of it. He learned the medium, then expanded his vision in order to best use and develop the form.

    In the process of doing what Clampett did naturally, he pushed Warner Bros. and the whole cartoon medium faster and harder than its own natural evolution was advancing. His example forced other more

naturally conservative directors to follow him. Without Clampett wildly stretching the boundaries of aggressively cartoony animation, brilliant directors like Chuck Jones might have been footnotes in animation history.

    Jones is probably the most famous, and definitely one of the most talented cartoon directors in our history, but the aggressive, sarcastic, violent, slapstick cartoons that he is now revered for were made against his more natural bent.

    Jones (along with Clampett) was a founding member of Tex Avery's "Termite Terrace" unit at Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s. This unit is famous for creating an "irreverent" anti-Disney style of cartoons.

    Incidentally, when people refer to Termite Terrace today, they assume that all of the Warner Bros. cartoonists worked in a wooden shack for their whole tenure at the studio. This building only housed the Tex Avery unit in the mid-'30s and was hidden on a backlot away from the main studio. This crew was younger than the main Warner's team and Clampett, Jones and the others were given to Avery because they didn't get along with the older men and wanted to try out new things. According to Clampett, Friz Freleng wouldn't have been caught dead in Termite Terrace.

    By 1938 Chuck Jones was promoted to director of his own unit and was free to express his own creative style and ideas.

    While Clampett and Avery continued rebelling against Disney and the current cartoon fashions, Jones rebelled against their rebellion. He immediately reverted to copying what Disney was doing. In 1938, the year Clampett directed such surreal, aggressive, admittedly primitive but purely "Looney Tunes" style cartoons as Porky in Wackyland, Porky's Naughty Nephew, Porky in Egypt and Daffy Doc, Jones directed his first cartoon, The Night Watchman. 

    This cartoon stars a cute, Sniffles-like cat. In the story, the cute guy overcomes a gang of rowdy, jazz-loving "cool" mice. It's tempting to read an allegorical message relating to Chuck's own situation as the

cute animator among the trouble-making Clampetts and Averys. 

    Chuck was just getting started. His films got cuter and cuter. The "Sniffles" series and the two "curious puppies" go even further than Disney in their stomach-churning sweetness. He seemed to be aiming at an audience of infants. Many of the cartoons feature very young little boy characters.

    You've got to see Tom Thumb in Trouble (1940) to believe it. A tall, burly, Paul Bunyan-like man lives out in the woods. with his tiny little darling boy who sleeps in the same bed with him. There is no wife to disrupt the harmony of this perfect boy-man relationship. One day, after bathing the naked little fruit of his loins in his cupped hands, Dad goes to work and leaves Tom home alone. When Tom accidentally almost drowns in a pan, a cute little bird crashes through the window and rescues him. Hairy old Dad comes home and finds the bird leaning over Tom, surrounded by broken glass, and imagines the worst. He lunges at the bird with a look of rage in his eyes so intense that you'd swear he's going to beat the living crap out of the little flying fellow. Luckily, the bird escapes. I won't ruin it for you by telling you the ending, but I have to say that this cartoon is so sweet that it's almost dirty. I love it.

    Besides being cute, many of Jones's early cartoons are very slow, and he himself has been known to apologize for this period of his work. He says of Elmer's Candid Camera, "It is obvious when one views this cartoon, which I recommend only if you are dying to die of ennui, that my conception of timing

and dialogue was formed by watching the action in the La Brea tar pits."

    It seems like during this time, Jones was concentrating more on his craft than on his entertainment. He was getting used to the tools of animation.

    He practiced all the tools of the cartoon form except its purest one — the funny drawing. Instead, he worried about good drawing and the art and technique in general. From cartoon to cartoon, the drawings of the characters become more solid and carefully constructed. The staging in these cartoons is very careful and deliberate; the backgrounds wrap around and frame the characters, rather than just sit behind the characters, as in many of his contemporaries' work. There are some very careful and studied attempts at subtle acting, as in the opening scenes of Robin Hood Makes Robin Hood Good (1939).

    There is a definite slow, steady progression, or evolution, in Jones' work, not only from this period, but even through his more popular period years later. Unlike Clampett, he didn't burst forth with new

ideas and experiments in a steady stream. Rather, he carefully built up his techniques and innovations one small step at a time. As Clampett plunged into uncharted waters stark naked, Chuck Jones stepped into the pool one nervous toe at a time. Except once.

    In 1942, Chuck Jones directed The Dover Boys. This was a radical departure from not only what he was doing, but from what everybody else in animation was doing or ever had done.

    He made a cartoon that didn't look like all the characters were made of balloons. The character designs were bold, graphic, angular and full of contrasts. This kind of look was not new to print cartoons; magazines like The New Yorker and comic strip cartoons in general featured a wide variety of cartoon styles, but nothing like this had been seen in animation. And there was a reason for it. Animators generally thought balloony shapes were easy to move in three dimensions, while graphic shapes would not animate well. This is true. It is easier to animate easy shapes.

    Chuck solved this problem by inventing a whole new way to animate. The Dover Boys features some very stylish and effective ways to move his characters that worked perfectly with the story and gags of the film. The most superficial innovation of the film is the use of huge stretched inbetweens that zip us from one extreme pose to another. Too many modern animators have discovered this and use it in place of animation as in the Sugar Bear commercials. In Chuck's hands though, the technique is wonderful.

    Oh yeah, and the story is funny.

    This was a real landmark for Jones, because it's the first time he was able to marry content with form. Up until then, you could watch a Jones film and say "Gee, that's a nice looking background," or "My, those are beautiful shadows on Sniffles' butt," or "Didn't that puppy move convincingly?" but you could never say "Wow! What a great cartoon!"

    Strangely, Jones never again made such a radical departure from his step-by-step, cautious evolution (unless you want to count The Dot and the Line, (1965) which is really more of a lecture than it is a cartoon). The Dover Boys is also responsible for inspiring John Hubley and the other artists who went on to found UPA years later, although I don't think there is one UPA cartoon that is as entertaining or well executed as its inspiration.

    After The Dover Boys, Jones did continue to experiment, although on a much smaller scale.

    While his characters reverted to the basically generic balloony style that he and Warner Bros. were used to, he continued to toy with background design. Hold the Lion Please and My Favorite Duck both have mildly "designy" backgrounds. The drawings are solid and the compositions have great depth, but the actual painting is flat, rather than the highly rendered and detailed background style of the day.

    In 1943, he started using wildly abstract backgrounds and spent a lot of the time in the cartoons practicing fancy camera moves. The Unbearable Bear, The Aristocat, Wackiki Wabbit and Fin 'n' Catty all feature balloony characters, boring, slow stories and very experimental settings. Unfortunately, the background treatment is so different than the character treatment that it effec- tively becomes wallpaper. Again, Jones was having trouble marrying form with content. 

    Jones's technique was obviously very good, but he wanted you to know it. He put his techniques up front, where you couldn't miss them. By the early '40s, the look, the animation, the tricks and all the window dressing were very clever and inventive, but he really seemed to be resisting what cartoons do best.

    Chuck Jones's early cartoons give off an air of smug pseudo-respectability, as if they are saying, "Look at me, I'm not a cartoon, I'm a work of art." I get the feeling that Jones felt some secret shame at being a cartoonist even though he is, by talent, an incredibly great, natural Cartoonist, second only to Clampett in my opinion. There is just that reservation in his work that needed to be conquered.

    Clampett conquered it for him. By the mid 1940s the wild, seemingly uncontrolled, "irreverent" Warner Bros.' Cartoons and their unique characters became the most popular cartoons in the world. The Looney Tunes were loved because they were "looney" and Clampett's were by far the "looney-est." His unrelenting whirlpool sucked in everyone in its wake, whether they wanted in or not. The other directors were giving up their cutesy Cartoons in favor of this new, more popular, more accessible kind of Cartoon. They turned away from making cartoons for animators and began making cartoons for people. Even Disney began to make harder,more raucous, more Cartoony cartoons, particularly Jack Kinney with his Goofy Sports Series.

    Once he broke from the Disney mold, Chuck Jones began making advances for the medium and eventually created his own unique an inspired cartoons, but he had a tough time making the initial change. By the mid-'40s Chuck made the definite break and consciously started trying to make funny Warner Bros.-style cartoons. It was at this time that he began to try to understand the stock Warner Bros. characters and gag style, although he needed intellectual justification to help him make the leap.

    He didn't approve of Warners' biggest star characters and needed to find excuses for them to act the way they had been acting when they became so popular. "Bugs is a counter-revolutionary, you know. He's not a revolutionary. He's not a Woody Woodpecker, which is how Bob Clampett used him. Clampett's Bugs Bunny did not involve the disciplines that we would put in.

    "I felt that somebody should always try to impose his will on Bugs. That gave him a reason to act, and I couldn't understand a character unless he had a reason for what he did.”

    By the time Chuck Jones finally broke down and began to make full-fledged Warner Bros. cartoons, he discovered a technique that helped him break down his natural resistance to Clampett-style cartoons and character's — rules. He also discovered another valuable tool: Michael Maltese.

In the next issue, John Kricfalusi discusses Chuck Jones's Golden Age. Kricfalusi is the president of Spumco.