And oh what heights he hit

Animator Chuck Jones' work passed the test of time with audiences

A film historian once observed that more people had laughed more heartily at the films of Chuck Jones than those of any other filmmaker. It’s a daunting claim, but a persuasive one.

Jones died Friday of congestive heart failure at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 89.

Former Warner Bros. animators and cartoonists Chuck Jones, left, and Friz Freleng pose at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in this 1985 file photo, during a 50th anniversary retrospective of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Jones, 89, best known for animating such beloved cartoon characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig, died Friday of congestive heart failure at his home in Corona Del Mar, Calif.

During a long, rich and celebrated career, Jones made more than 300 animated films, winning three Oscars as director and in 1996 an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

Though he didn’t create Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Porky Pig, he made some of the best cartoons that featured them. He pushed the chase genre beyond all barriers with his “Roadrunner” series, as funny today as when it started in 1949. His “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” made in the 1960s, remains a Yuletide classic, delighting TV audiences each year. In a career that spanned 300 short and feature-length animated films, Jones’ finest have proved to be among the most enduring of all time, as well as the most creative and technically polished.

Beyond Disney’s rules

When Jones became an animation director in 1938, Hollywood animation largely meant Walt Disney. Though he had competitors in the animated short market, nearly all of them labored under the aesthetic rules laid down by Disney.

Leon Schlesinger, Jones’ boss who produced cartoons for Warner Bros., was no different, expecting his animation unit to produce semirealistic, cuddly animal characters doing comic bits in a world of illusionary reality. But while Disney was spending about $25,000 per short, Warners allowed less than $8,000.

Jones, a superb artist and animator, immediately showed himself to be as good as anyone at this imitative task. In 1940, he made an Elmer Fudd short, “Good Night, Elmer,” which consists entirely of the roly-poly Fudd trying to blow out a candle that won’t die. The rise and fall of the light, the wavering of shadows, and Elmer’s own suggestion of three dimensions, are immediately suggestive of Disney work, though obviously done on a tighter budget.

But Jones soon went further than mere imitation, developing an experimental style that pushed the boundaries of the form.

Jones reached an early landmark in 1942 when he and his unit turned out “The Dover Boys.” The next year, Jones went even farther with a Bugs Bunny cartoon called “Wackiki Rabbit.” It’s a typical Bugs story: Two starving castaway sailors (modeled on cartoon writers Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese) land on an island where they try to make a meal of Bugs. But even today, more than a half-century later, the movie looks radical, with the jungle backdrop essentially reduced to textile patterns splotched with watery impressions of flora.

While these films are fascinating for their restless creativity, they were the early part of a process. Jones was steadily assembling the team of writer (Maltese), layout artist (notably Maurice Noble), animators (chiefly Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Richard Thompson, Ben Washam, Phil Monroe and Lloyd Vaughn) who would be his chief cohorts (Carl Stalling’s music and Mel Blanc’s voices, while crucial to Jones’ work, weren’t unique to them; they were in almost every Warner’s cartoon). And he was choosing and discarding the different techniques with which he experimented.

Redefined Bugs

The payoff came sometime after World War II. Jones had spent some time in Frank Capra’s film unit, making humorous instructional cartoons starring a sad-sack soldier named Private Snafu (some of which were written by a young Theodor Geisel, who would become universally famous as Dr. Seuss). During the war, Bugs Bunny had come a long way, too. Animator Robert McKimson had refined and settled the rabbit into his settled form. At the same time, Bugs was becoming a cooler, more reactive character.

In 1949, Jones made “Long-Haired Hare,” one of his best, and one in which all his experiments came together in assured form. In it, Bugs torments an egotistical opera singer after the arrogant baritone had rudely and violently interrupted Bugs’ own evening warbles. The sheer dynamism of the six-minute movie is remarkable, with Jones adding a live-action style of editing to his quiver.

By this point, Jones had reached his prime, turning out cartoons that were stylistically brilliant and hilariously funny. The fusion of style and content was so great that he could seemingly work unlimited variations on the same joke. In 1951-53, he made three cartoons with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd, sometimes referred to as the “rabbit season-duck season” trilogy.

In “Rabbit Fire,” “Rabbit Seasoning” and “Duck Rabbit Duck,” Daffy tries earnestly to convince Elmer that it’s rabbit-hunting season, even though it’s actually duck-hunting time. Daffy loses every time, of course, even while identifying the key shift in the argument that does him in as “pronoun trouble.”

Jones expanded his use of close-ups here, too, his stasis-action approach being perfect for the introduction of Bugs’ raised eyebrow or Daffy’s narrowed eyes.

Keeping it real

But it wasn’t just technique that made Jones’ cartoons special. It was the way Jones thought of his characters: as real, as alive. And that was something he never lost sight of, even as he elaborated in a 1995 interview with the Orange County Register while talking about the difference between two favorite characters:

“Daffy rushes in and fears to tread at the same time. Daffy obviously is the character I’m most familiar with and closest to. He’s a lot more like me than Bugs, who is far too heroic and too competent to be me. In other words, I can dream about being Bugs Bunny, but when I wake up there’s Daffy.”

But there was nothing really Daffy about Jones. He knew exactly what he was doing. Knew exactly how to make us laugh. As his cartoons will continue to prove for years to come. And for that we should all be continually grateful.