Kevin Lally on Film

Few people today remember the 1992 Warner Bros. release Stay Tuned, but how could I pass up the opportunity to get on the phone with one of my childhood heroes, the animation master Chuck Jones? Fortunately, this interview spends a minimum of time discussing his seven-minute contribution to that project and much more on his philosophy of animation, and the evolving state of the art in the early nineties. Jones died in 2002 at the age of 89.

When the producers of Stay Tuned needed someone to supervise the creation of a special seven-minute animated segment, they settled for no less than the best. Chuck Jones, one of the legendary figures from the golden age of Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes short subjects, accepted the task of devising rodent alter egos for the movie’s leads, John Ritter and Pam Dawber. However briefly, these former TV favorites can now join the stellar parade of cartoon stars Jones has nurtured: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, among many others

Directed by Peter Hyams, Stay Tuned is the zany tale of a suburban couch potato and his executive fast-track wife who unwittingly accept a trial TV offer from the Devil and wind up in a 666-channel netherworld called Hellvision. There, they are zapped through a diabolical array of game shows, sitcoms, commercials and educational programs with titles like “Wheel of Torture” and “Nude Beekeeping.” One of the couple’s most disorienting stops is a Saturday morning cartoon show, where they find themselves transformed into animated mice and chased by a mechanical menace called RoboCat. The 79-year-old Jones designed the characters and co-directed their cartoon antics with a young protégé, Jeff De Grandis of the “Tiny Toon Adventures” TV series.

“Because each sequence had to further the overall story of the entire film,” Jones notes, “I couldn’t fool around with the script as much as I would have liked to.” Fortunately, the veteran director was given complete freedom in designing his new cat and mouse creations. “It wasn’t necessary to do caricatures [of Ritter and Dawber]. I simply wanted to make the characters believable as mice, and their personalities would come through because their voices are the same as when they are live-action. We’ve always done that. Bugs Bunny is not Bugs Bunny because of what he looks like, but because of the way he moves… If a good animator is around anybody for a while, he will be able to tell that you’re different from other people by the way you move—whether you scratch your nose or pull your ear, all the things that psychologists call ‘displacement activities.’

“If you look up animation in the dictionary, it means ‘to evoke life.’ We never thought of ourselves as dealing in drawings. When I draw a character, I think: Who is the personality involved here? And drawing is a method of getting that on the screen, in the same sense that motion pictures are 24 still pictures per second… Both animation and live-action, in their mechanics, are much more similar to music than to any form of graphic art, because of the time element. In music, you get a continuing series of sounds inpinging on the ear in sequence, and in animation and live-action you get a flurry of drawings or images impeding successfully on the optic nerve.

“The drawings never come first,” Jones reveals. “I have an idea of a character long before I know what the character looks like, just as when you’re writing a screenplay—unless you’re writing for, say, a Jerry Lewis or a Cary Grant. You write the character and then the director starts casting. When I get to that part, I start drawing. The idea of the story is pretty well in my mind before I ever start making drawings.”

Jones started out making drawings—not very good ones, he insists—as a student at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts). After graduation, he joined the staffs of former Disney pioneer Ub Iwerks and Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, and in 1933 reported to work for the notoriously unappreciative Warner Brothers cartoon producer Leon Schlesinger. Jones would remain at the Warner animation unit for the next 30 years, working his way up from in-betweener (assistant animator) to animator to director. He made his directing bow in 1938 with “The Night Watchman” and brought his own subtle flair for characterization to the development of Warner cartoon stalwarts like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Generally less anarchic than the work of fellow Warner directors Tex Avery (who moved to MGM in 1942) and Robert Clampett, Jones’s cartoons are distinguished by their verbal wit, their deft handling of facial and body language, their painstaking comic timing and their stylish background art.

Jones directed more than 200 cartoons while at Warner Bros., many of them classics beloved by several generations. Daffy Duck enjoyed some of his finest moments in the genre sendups “The Scarlet Pumpernickel” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century” and the surreal nightmare of “Duck Amuck.” Bugs and Elmer, meantime, were brilliantly funny in the mini-operas “Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” The landmark “Dover Boys” anticipated by a decade the airy, stylized look of the UPA cartoons, while “One Froggy Evening,” a cautionary tale about a singing frog and a hapless would-be entrepreneur, is considered one of the wittiest animated shorts ever made. Jones is also the creator of such long-running characters as the stubbornly amorous skunk Pepe Le Pew, and Wile E. Coyote, the ultimate victim of the technological age in his pursuit of the forever-elusive Road Runner.

In 1962, as Warner began to shut down its animation department, Jones formed his own production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises. He worked at MGM from 1964 to 1967, helming a number of Tom and Jerry romps and the Oscar-winning short “The Dot and the Line.” Jones made his only feature film, The Phantom Tollbooth, in 1971, and his many TV specials include the Dr. Seuss perennial How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears a Who, The Cricket in Times Square, and A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court. Jones continues to create new animation for TV compilations of vintage Warner cartoons, has had old and new examples of his animation art exhibited in galleries and museums nationwide, and recently created a successful series of baseball cards spotlighting his famed characters.

Reflecting on the longevity of his cartoon classics, Jones says, “I guess one of the reasons they do last is that they were never planned to last… From the time we started until the end, they were all made for theaters. And before television, there wasn’t any place for them to go—what could you do with them? By the time it got down to fifth run, [a cartoon] would draw maybe a five-dollar weekly rental, and by that time it had so many scratches you could hardly read it. Then they would just throw away the positive. Fortunately, they kept the negatives. But as far as making new positives, they made the first batch and that was it. Second run meant exactly what it sounds like, only by then it was second stumble. So it never occurred to us that our stuff would be around for more than three years.”

The executive hierarchy at Warner Bros. was also clearly unaware that its cartoon unit was generating something of lasting value. Jones confirms the apocryphal-sounding story that Jack Warner actually thought his company made Mickey Mouse cartoons; the studio later burned most of the valuable production cels that today would fetch high prices at auction. Producer Leon Schlesinger, who spent more time at the race track than on the lot, generally left the creative staff to their own devices, but his stingy nature allowed no room for failed experiments or wasted footage. “We had to learn how to time the pictures before they went to animation,” Jones recalls. “All our films were pre edited—the term ‘film editor’ had no meaning. I could edit our films—it was just a matter of splicing them. It drives people like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas mad that we could make a picture exactly the length it was supposed to be. I love to see Steven squirm.”

Jones has always been an outspoken critic of the limited animation techniques that dominate today’s Saturday morning TV cartoon shows (the notable exception being the high-rated Bugs Bunny show culled from the Warner library). “There’s an easy way to tell full animation from limited animation,” Jones observes. “Any Saturday morning, look at a couple of things like the Smurfs or even the Hanna-Barbera things, turn the sound off, and you won’t be able to tell what is happening. In our stuff, you can turn the sound off and you can tell what is happening because they’re acting. Conversely, in our pictures, if you shut the picture off you can’t very well tell what is happening—for instance, in the Road Runners, all you’ll hear is ‘beep beep.’ But in the Saturday morning stuff, you can easily tell because the only thing they have is what a character looks like and what he says—they all act the same. They all jump up and zip out, and if somebody gets really passionate, they blink an eye.”

The veteran director is very encouraged, though, by the current boom in fully animated features, spurred by box-office smashes like The Little Mermaid, The Land Before Time, and Beauty and the Beast. “There was a long, long period fomented by various studios—Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, DIC—where all they did was limited animation. There was little time to develop great animators because there wasn’t any demand for them. Now, there’s intense demand for them. Don Bluth is doing new features and doing well with them, and Disney is now doing two a year. Nearly all the animators on this film were trained at the California Institute of the Arts, and a lot of that program was financed by the Disney trust—they put in well over $50 million. Nearly all the animators at Disney, too, are these young people, and that’s the way it should be. When Peter hired me to design these characters, I immediately began thinking in terms of how can we involve young people. I probably wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for that.”

In recent years, Jones has been honored with film festival retrospectives and lifetime achievement awards recognizing his vital contributions as both an animation director and comic artist. But this gentle, erudite filmmaker remains surprisingly humble about his accomplishments. “When I talk to art students, I tell them that when you start drawing you’re penalizing yourself to a lifetime of frustration. You can’t become president of drawing or president of writing. When you hear Dan Quayle or any of the rest of the idiots in this world talking about reach for your goals and keep going until you reach them—horseshit! A writer or artist can’t reach his goal, because the closer he gets to it, the further away it moves. The better you become, the lower your opinion of yourself is. I know when I finish a drawing, the only thing I can see are the mistakes. When I finish a picture, I do, too. It’s not hard being modest when you realize the incredible variety and potential of animation.”

(Photo ©Don Perdue/Handout)