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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The legacy of Chuck Jones, the most celebrated director in cartoon history, is as overinflated as an Acme balloon.
Jun 6, 2000 | Bugs Bunny spins around. A table and a nail file materialize out of thin air, and Bugs mugs at a huge, orange creature who has been chasing the rabbit through a mad scientist's lair. Instead of trying to escape from the creature -- who wears sneakers -- Bugs leans in with the nail file and starts to give him a manicure. "My, I'll bet you monsters lead interesting lives," he says in a high, effeminate voice. The monster is, of course, disarmed. The fast, unexpected and hilarious sequence belongs to the Warner Bros. cartoon "Hair-Raising Hare" (1946), one of the funniest of the hundreds of Bugs Bunny cartoons.
The man behind the cartoon was the celebrated Chuck Jones, the director of great WB animated shorts and the creator of the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew and that now-ubiquitous singing amphibian, Michigan J. Frog. Though only one of several people who directed cartoons for WB in its 1940s and '50s golden age, Jones has become so genial and likable a representative of Looney Tunes -- in interviews and in two entertaining books of memoirs, "Chuck Amuck" and "Chuck Reducks" -- that now he is routinely talked about as though he were the only representative of that great cartoon tradition. Jones, in fact, is the only WB cartoon director to receive a special Academy Award for his work (in 1997), and no cartoon director has more famous or influential fans: Steven Spielberg, for one, wrote the foreword for "Chuck Amuck." There have also been laudatory essays on Jones by well-known film critics; Time's Richard Schickel singled out "a genius named Chuck Jones" as the greatest figure in WB cartoon history.
But what hasn't been mentioned by such critics is that Jones receives a disproportionate amount of the acclaim for WB's finest moments. Jones had a golden decade at WB ending in the mid-'50s, but the rest of his career never lived up to that period. Further, his early cartoons were mostly mediocre Disney imitations, and other directors did far more than he to invent the style of WB cartoons. Finally, his accounts of WB cartoon history, especially about director Bob Clampett, have not always been strictly accurate. Chuck Jones undoubtedly created some of the finest cartoons ever made, but his spotty legacy deserves another look. Could the most celebrated director in cartoon history be as overinflated as an Acme balloon? It's a funny business.
Jones' career as a cartoon director started in 1939 with "The Night Watchman," a short, sappy film about a terrified kitten put in charge of patrolling for mice. Jones spent the next three years making some of the dullest cartoons at the studio, full of cute little characters doing cute little things. At the time, WB cartoons were pulling ahead of the more sedate shorts of Disney and the less disciplined work of Max and Dave Fleischer. Tex Avery had created Bugs Bunny in "A Wild Hare"; Bob Clampett was making bizarre and brilliant cartoons like "Porky in Wackyland"; and Friz Freleng created the landmark animation/live-action combination "You Ought to Be in Pictures." Jones' main contribution to WB in this era was Sniffles, the wide-eyed, inexpressibly annoying little mouse whose warmhearted adventures ruined many a child's Saturday morning (and who has recently returned in an MCI commercial to torment a whole new generation).
Even at their best, Jones' early cartoons were low-budget Disney; at their worst, they could be as slow and ponderous as "Good Night Elmer" (1940), where Elmer Fudd spent an animated eternity trying to blow out a candle. Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, in "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons," call this "one of the most irritating cartoons ever made," though it has competition from anything starring Jones' other early creation, Conrad Cat.
In 1942 Jones pulled himself out of his rut -- he "finally saw the light," as Tex Avery recalled -- and started to make consistently funny cartoons. His one-of-a-kind masterpiece "The Dover Boys" (1942) featured stylized character and background designs and an all-human cast that influenced the later cartoons of Columbia's UPA studio ("Mr. Magoo"). Yet except for that one piece, Jones was not an innovator but a consumer of other people's innovations. The faster pace, the violent gags, the topical references, the standard catchphrases -- all of these elements had already been developed by Avery, Clampett and Freleng before Jones got around to using them.
In the late '40s, and especially after forming a full-time partnership with gag man Michael Maltese, Jones hit his stride as a director. There was some indication in the early '50s that his well would dry up -- he retired some of his funniest characters, like the scheming mice Hubie and Bertie, to concentrate on the most formulaic characters (Pepe Le Pew, the Road Runner) -- but on the whole, his cartoons earned all the praise they've received. The trouble is that the brilliant period didn't last very long; a definite decline began in the mid-'50s. The turning point probably came in 1955, when the WB cartoon studio opened again after having been shut down for a few months. Though most of his old crew eventually came back, including Maltese, Jones' work started a gradual but clear shift toward some form of what it had been when he started: slow, cute and not all that funny.
