Here is an article from the Atlantic. It's about Chuck Jones and it was published in 1984 and written by Lloyd Rose.
CHUCK JONES IS one of the great silent clowns of the screen, though he has only once appeared in front of the camera. He did a walk-on under his own name (Mr. Jones) in Gremlins, a movie that is on one level a tribute to the art that Jones brought to its peak--the anarchic Warner Brothers style of animation. Jones worked at Warner Brothers as a director for twenty-five years, during which he developed Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to their full comic richness and, along with his scriptwriter/gagman Michael Maltese, created the Coyote and his prey and nemesis the Road Runner.
It's true that Jones's cartoons are violent, but his characters never bleed, never die, and are never permanently injured; they have an India-rubber resilience, the immortality of handballs. They also have wit, style, and humor. And it's getting harder and harder to see them. The newly packaged The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, seen on Saturday morning, is (unlike its predecessor of the same name, which featured Jones's cartoons) filled mostly with the second-rate cartoons made at Warners by inferior directors in the early sixties, during Jones's final years there. (Now seventy-two, Jones has for the past twenty years produced his own television specials--the most famous of which is How the Grinch Stole Christmas.) Occasionally one of his cartoons flashes across the Saturday-morning TV screen. In such shabby surroundings the vitality and beauty of his work stands out even more boldly than usual.
The key to Jones's brilliance is that he is an actor--but he acts with bodies he draws rather than with his own. As a boy, he lived a couple of blocks from Chaplin's studios, and he used to go down after school and watch Chaplin film. From this he learned not only technique but, watching Chaplin do a take again and again, patience and fanatical attention to detail. Though he never became an actor, he was to continue and preserve the art of silent-screen comedy, through a series of more than 200 cartoons, up till the early sixties.
Bugs, Daffy, the Coyote, and the romantic French skunk Pep6 le Pew are not characters that Jones puts into cartoons as a novelist might put them into a story--they' re characters he plays. They all share certain characteristics: high energy, expressive eyes, exquisite comic timing, and the ability to surprise us. We recognize these characteristics in all of them as we recognize the physical presence of an actor in various roles. To give them individuality, Jones brings to each an element of his own personality. The Coyote represents his inability to deal with certain things in the physical world, particularly tools. Pepe le Pew is his dream vision of himself as irresistible to women. Bugs is the inoffensive guy who, when roused, is as unbeatable as Groucho Marx. Daffy, whose motto is "I may be mean but at least I'm alive," is the complete survivalist. Unlike a flesh-and-blood actor, Jones has the privilege of playing two or more characters simultaneously. Some of his funniest cartoons result from matching the unflappable and ironic Bugs with the desperate and treacherous Daffy. Daffy plots against Bugs; Bugs eludes him with lazy ease. Daffy, through greed, falls into trouble; Bugs, sighing, rescues him.
BUGS WAS DESIGNED by Charles Thorson at the request of the animator Ben "Bugs" Hardaway (and labeled "Bugs' bunny"), and his personality as a Brooklyn wiseacre cockily demanding "What's up, Doc?" was the creation of Tex Avery (who also invented the wild, nonrealistic Warner Brothers animation style). Jones, though, directed more than half of the Bugs cartoons made, and has said that Bugs "was something more personal and special to me ... than any other character I directed."
Jones's Bugs is easily distinguishable from that of any other director. His movements give the sense that he has real mass and inertia, that he weighs something, and Jones has frankly borrowed for him gestures from the great silent comedians (Keaton's eye movements, Chaplin's one-legged hopping turn). His Bugs also has sophistication--he is less the loudmouthed wise guy, more the gentleman anarchist. (In spite of the mad pace of his cartoons, Jones is never frenzied--his characters all possess a certain amount of dignity. This is why his work at MGM, where he went after Warner Brothers shut down its animation studio, isn't successful. The crudely violent format of the Tom and Jerry cartoons he was given to direct is at odds with his comic sense and style. His Tom and Jerry seem not to belong to the world established by the series; they're too sweet-natured.)
Jones always liked to start with Bugs in a setting natural to a rabbit (unlike, say, the Friz Frelengcartoon in which he is introduced tap-dancing down the street singing "She's the daughter of Rosie O'Grady"). Having limited himself with this rule, Jones developed a comic way of both sticking to and circumventing it: when he wanted Bugs in an exotic locale (Scotland, maybe, or the Himalayas), he just had him pop suddenly out of the ground, expecting to have burrowed to somewhere else. Bugs's grace under pressure is literal--he floats, dashes, and, in one lyrical moment in "Bully for Bugs," dances away from his persecutors. Bugs can rise to any occasion. In "What's Opera, Doc?"--arguably Jones's finest cartoon--he dons a blonde wig and a brass brassiere to sing a Wagnerian duet with Elmer Fudd (who has previously regaled us with "Kill the Wabbit!" to the melody of "The Ride of the Valkyries"). Bugs dances in this one too, as does Elmer. They do a little ballet together, while an ample white horse, supplying the fleshy operatic presence that the more slender protagonists lack, minces like a prima donna in the background.
Bugs does not need sound to realize much of the comedy of this--it's there in his expressions and gestures. But he does speak, of course, and the parody of "What's Opera, Doc?" would be lost without the music. Jones and Maltese actually wrote pretty funny dialogue (Pep6 le Pew's amorous murmurings-"Ah, la belle femme skunk fatale!"-are particularly good), but the cartoons, despite the bravura vocal performance of Mel Blanc as most of the characters, don't depend on it. Jones used to run his cartoons without the soundtrack just to be sure everything was clear even without the words. But he didn't take the final step into silent comedy until the Road Runner cartoons, in which the only spoken sound is "Beep! Beep!"
Jones and Maltese created the Road Runner in 1949, and Jones went on to make twenty-four Road Runner cartoons. They're minimalist in an amusingly practical way--Jones provided for the setting only what the story needed. This is basically a desert, with a highway for the Road Runner to run down. There are also, as needed, train tracks for the Coyote to get run over on, train tunnels for the Coyote to get run over in, and cliffs for the Coyote to fall off. And there is the occasional mailbox, so that the Coyote may write to the Acme Company and order devices with which to trap the Road Runner. (It hardly seems necessary to add that these devices not only always fail to catch the bird but invariably backfire in the Coyote's face.)
After the first few cartoons Jones didn't even bother to have the Coyote pursue the Road Runner from hunger. He just chases him, without reason or possibility of success. The bleak undertone of his predicament combined with the stripped-down environment gives the cartoons a modernist feel--sort of banana-peel Beckett. But essentially they're gag pictures: their comedy is mainly in the setup, the buildup, and the payoff of the physical joke, as well as the overall shape of the action. The Coyote runs a taut wire from the top of a cliff down to the road along which the Road Runner will pass. He dons a helmet with a tiny wheel on top of it. He headstands onto the wire. He quivers from side to side, searching desperately for balance, just missing it; we expect he will fall any second. He finds his balance. He settles into upside-down equilibrium. He is perfectly poised. The wire snaps. At moments like this, Jones stands with Keaton and Chaplin.
Jones achieved his comedy through the design and manipulation of drawings that move past the viewer at twenty-four frames a second. His timing was a matter of knowing how many twenty-fourths of a second to hold a pause or track a fall. As a director Jones didn't draw anywhere near the 8,000-plus pictures necessary for a six-minute cartoon. He did two or three hundred drawings, the beginnings, ends, and high points that shaped and defined each physical action. The rest of the work was done by Jones's animators (for most of his career they were Lloyd Vaughan, Ben Washam, Ken Harris, Phil Monroe, Dick Thompson, and Abe Levitow), who filled in and gave their own touches to the character's movements. These animators in turn had in-betweeners to do those last cells that account for the minuscule movements an arm or tail might make in three or four frames.
Disney, whose sentimental and hyperrealistic style the Warner Brothers cartoonists rejected, was nonetheless the father of their art: expression of character through movement. Jones (who worked for Disney very briefly, on Sleeping Beauty) considers The Three Little Pigs to be the breakthrough film. The pigs all look alike but are distinguishable by their postures and expressions. Jones calls this "character animation," and has said it is "unique to America, like jazz," laying claim to it as one of our few native art forms. The Warners cartoons, like those of Disney, were made to be shown in movie theaters to adult audiences. Those audiences wept at Snow White in 1938, and an adult today watching a Jones cartoon from the fifties may laugh till tears are in his eyes.
Lloyd Rose writes on film and theater for The Atlantic.
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