What's up, doc? ANIMATION / Toiling in the shadow of Walt Disney, the gang at Warner Brothers felt unwatched. But the environment spawned an irreverent, kinetic and witty style that can be savoured at Toronto's Bugs Bunny Festival
Toronto ONT -- Somebody is always saying to me, 'How come there's so much violence in your cartoons?' I just don't know how to answer that. If you think they're too violent to show to children, all I can say is, don't show them to children. They weren't made for children. They were made for me. -Cartoon director Chuck Jones BY GEOFF PEVERE Special to The Globe and Mail Toronto AS one of the animators squirrelled away in the bunker known affectionately around the Warner Brothers lot as "Termite Terrace," Chuck Jones was not alone in thinking he was making cartoons for himself. During the two decades (from the late 1930s to late 50s) that Jones and his cronies were advancing the state of comic character animation at a pace that would gag a road runner, nobody was paying much attention.
Jones, a multiple Oscar winner, recalls being under Warner Bros.' employment "15 to 20 years" before actually laying eyes on Jack Warner, only to realize that the fearsome studio boss knew neither the name of Jones nor that of his colleague, Friz Freleng. "When he saw us together, he'd call us Mutt and Jeff because I was tall and Friz was short."
Today, anybody who cares about cartoons knows the names of Jones and Freleng, along with many other termites: animators Fred "Tex" Avery, Frank Tashlin and Bob Clampett; voice maestro Mel Blanc; musical director Carl Stalling; layout artists Maurice Noble and Hawley Pratt; gag writer Michael Maltese. The Warner cartoons are now respected as a watermark of studio character animation, as good as, if not better than, the contemporary work of Walt Disney. Cumulatively, they point to an intersection where formula collided with inspiration, where the characters on the screen were fuelled by the personal quirkiness of the animators in the studio. Today, Warner cartoon-related books, retrospectives and college courses abound, and many of the studio's best moments are available in collector video editions.
Another opportunity to appreciate the genius of Jack Warner's termites is currently available in Toronto at the Bloor Cinema, where a 12-cartoon retrospective called (misleadingly because it's got Daffy, Porky, Pepe and Tweety, too) The Bugs Bunny Festival '94 runs until Jan. 2.
Sixty years ago, Warner Bros. reluctantly entered the animation age, and only because the seemingly out-of-nowhere success of the Disney operation - where Jones had once worked, miserably - made it impossible for competing studios not to make cartoons. That's why the company originally subcontracted its cartoons. Technically speaking, most of the greatest Warner Bros. cartoon characters - Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd - weren't created by the studio. They were created by an independent company run by Leon Schlesinger, a rotund lisper whom Warner Bros. had hired to oversee the cartoons it felt obliged to produce and who subsequently served as the prototype for Porky Pig.
That's why, during the thirties and forties, you didn't feel much worth as an animator if you weren't working for Uncle Walt. All industry eyes were on the little studio that had created Mickey Mouse - the first cartoon superstar of the sound era - and the eye-popping Snow White (1937) . To work elsewhere was to be in the cartoon equivalent of the boonies. Most years it was Walt who took home the animation Oscars and later, on those rare years when he didn't, any won by the Warner Bros. animators were eagerly absconded with by Schlesinger's successor, the detested Edward Seizer. This left little reason not to check your egos at the door of Termite Terrace. Jones once told Joe Adamson, "We would look at (Disney's) stuff and say, 'No matter what we do, Disney is going to be ahead of us.' " So humbled was the environment, Jones recalls, "We never thought of ourselves as artists. We never used the term."
Ironically, it turned out to be the ideal environment for the care and feeding of an artistic revolution in studio animation. Feeling unwatched and unwanted, convinced they'd never catch the almighty Walt, the Warner Bros. animators were free to burrow any which way they pleased. "Without thinking," Jones once said with epic understatement, "we evolved our own style."
The origins of that style - irreverent, kinetic and witty - can be traced to the arrival of one Frederick Bean "Tex" Avery at the Termite Terrace in 1935. Fresh from the Walter Lantz cartoon studio, Avery took charge of the fledgling unit, which included Jones, Bob Clampett and later Frank Tashlin, and proceeded to forge what would come to be recognized as the inimitable Warner cartoon style.
Where Disney was increasingly beholden to cute, anthropomorphic realism, Avery was a firm believer in animation as a licence to artistic lunacy. It was he who prodded his charges to crank up the pace in their cartoons, he who saw the key to the character that would soon be universally known as Bugs Bunny. In A Wild Hare from 1940, for example, it takes about 30 seconds for Avery to transform a hitherto innocuous bunny named Bugs (after writer Ben "Bugs" Hardaway) into a cultural icon. Coming upon a conspicuously unruffled rabbit lounging against a tree, Elmer Fudd raises his shotgun level with the carrot in the bunny's mouth. Delicately pivoting the barrel away with a white-gloved raised pinky, Bugs says - for the first time ever, "Eeeeeeeh . . . What's up, Doc?"
In giving the rabbit that breezily insouciant line, Avery introduced one of the most vivid personalities in the history of cartoons, and the production of sharp cartoon personalities soon became what set the gang at Warner Bros. apart from studio animators everywhere. While others got by on gags, design and brand-named familiarity, the termites put all these things at the service of character. Once you had a personality that people knew and expected, you could put that character in any situation imaginable. "I've always felt that what you did with a character was more than the character itself," Avery once said. "Bugs Bunny could have been a bird."
Jones, who would prove one of the most subtle engineers of cartoon character (some of whose best work is on display in The Bugs Bunny Festival) went further: "I don't think you can make comedy unless you're involved with the characters. It has never occurred to me that these were not living things."
And alive they were, provided you're talking about inspiration as a dynamic force. Avery's legacy (he would eventually move to MGM and later - sadly - TV commercials) was the belief that cartoon character was an ideal screen for the projection of the animator's personality. The stronger that personality, the bolder the cartoons it produced. Unburdened by status or respect, convinced the glory was all Disney's anyway, Jack Warner's cartoon team was left with no choice but to make cartoons for the only judges who seemed to care: themselves. That's why we now know them as artists, something they never dreamed of calling themselves.
GEOFF PEVERE
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