Chuck Jones

Charles Martin Jones, animator: born Spokane, Washington 21 September 1912; twice married (one daughter); died Corona del Mar, California 22 February 2002.

Chuck Jones's cartoon career spanned half of the 20th century, 50 years of fun. The inscription on his studio door read "Chuck Jones and the Acme Corporation"; the caption beneath added "We Make Fine Acmes". No fan of the cartoon films made by Jones will need reminding that Acme was the company who provided the many supposed death-traps supplied to a certain coyote for ensnaring a certain road runner. None of them worked, all of them backfired, but the coyote never paid for them anyway.

Charles Martin Jones was born in 1912, in Spokane, Washington. A few years later his father moved the family to Hollywood, setting up an orange grove on Sunset Boulevard, just two blocks away from the Charles Chaplin Film Studio. The six-year-old schoolboy spent many a day standing outside the gates watching the Little Tramp taking his scenes over and over until he had them timed to perfection.

Jones senior, who moved out of oranges and into avocados, encouraged his four children to draw; Richard grew up to be a painter, Margaret a fashion designer, Dorothy a sculptress and young Chuck a cartoonist. Chuck's funny way with a pencil line first burst into prominence at Franklin High School. He illustrated the school newspaper and the annual class yearbook. Graduating to Chouinard Art Institute at the age of 15, he left in 1930 well versed in pen and ink, pastels and colouring. His sense of humour was his own.

His first jobs were nothing outstanding. "I was a maladroit puppeteer, then a sidewalk sketch artist. I charged a dollar a throw – a grotesque overcharge!" he recalled. Chuck Jones's first brush with animation occurred in 1931. He was hired as a cel-washer at Ub Iwerks' Celebrity Productions. This meant he rinsed the ink drawings off the animators' celluloid sheets so that they could be used afresh in the next film.

Soon he was promoted to "in- betweener" to Grim Natwick, drawing the movements that linked the important poses drawn by that veteran animator. This meant that of every 10 or so drawings, Natwick drew one and Jones drew nine. The character, by the way, was Flip the Frog.

When Iwerks closed his studio, in 1933 Jones joined Leon Schlesinger's studio. Schlesinger, who had run the Pacific Art and Title Company in silent film days, now supplied short cartoon films under contract to Warner Brothers. A purely nominal executive and money man, Schlesinger left everything to his animators who worked under the writer/director partnership of Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. By the time Jones had worked his way up from in-betweener to story writer, gagsmith, animator and assistant director, Harman and Ising had left for MGM to form Harman-Ising Cartoons.

In 1935 Fred Avery, known as "Tex" to his chums and shortly to all cartoon film lovers, took over Termite Terrace, as the old silent studio building being used to produce Warner's cartoons was cheerfully called. Avery came from Walter Lantz's fun factory at Universal, and soon unleashed a new and vital looninesss and speed-driven style on the Warner product. Merrie Melodies, originally named to cash in on Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, became Merrier, and Looney Tunes, named to be funnier than the melodious shorts, became even Loonier. From 1936 Jones worked on seven Avery productions before being promoted to director in his own right in 1938.

Jones's earliest Warner credit as an animator had been on Buddy of the Legion (1935), teamed with another genius of animated comedy, Bob Clampett. Director, or "supervisor" as they were billed then, was Ben Hardaway. Hardaway was nicknamed "Bugs" and when he co- designed a new character for a later cartoon, a wisecracking rabbit, this became known as Bugs's Bunny, a title later abbreviated, of course.

Buddy of the Legion, a burlesque of Foreign Legion films, had Buddy dreaming he defended a desert fort from a tribe of Amazonian women. "We never made cartoons for children in those years," explained Jones. "Our shorts were made to support Warner's features, like I Was a Fugitive From a Chain and Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet."

In 1938 Jones was promoted to supervisor when Isadore "Friz" Freleng departed Warners for MGM. His first film, one of the Merrie Melodies, was scripted by Tedd Pierce, animated by Ken Harris, and entitled The Night Watchman. When Tom Cat fell ill, his son Tommy was deputised to patrol the house against a tough mouse and his pretzel-pinching gang. Not much of a plot, and truly not much of a film. Like all Jones's early cartoons it was more of an exercise in perfect animation than in comedy.

Dog Gone Modern (1939) was not much better, although it introduced Jones's first regular characters. These were known as the "Two Curious Puppies" who got caught up in the weird inventions contained in a model house of the future. Again the animation was perfect, and this became a trademark of Jones's early work. He gave his characters detailed movement and weight, something that the whiz-bang work of directors like Bob Clampett never worried about.

Of his many early films, Naughty But Mice (1939) is pleasant, introducing his second regular character, Sniffles the Mouse, but outstanding is Little Lion Hunter from the same year. This featured a small African boy called Inki, who tries his little best to catch a lion, only to be frequently interrupted by an extraordinary walking mynah bird who hops oddly to the tune of "Fingal's Cave". This brilliant film began a hilarious but curiously infrequent series that remains outstanding in the history of animated cartoons.

Meanwhile, Jones was taking his turn with regular Warner characters, adding his own personal touch each time. His first encounter with the wackiest quacker of them all was in Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (1939), which starred Casper Caveman, "played" by a caricature of the comedian Jack Benny ("My favourite vegetable is duck!"). Jones starred the stuttering Porky Pig in Old Glory (1939), that animal's début in technicolor and a six-minute lesson in American history. Critics found it unfunny and one branded it "the only 100 per cent gagless Warner cartoon ever".

Nineteen-forty saw the appearance of an unusual cartoon based on a long-running newspaper strip, James Swinnerton's Canyon Kiddies. This was entitled The Mighty Hunters and interweaved three different story-lines. In the same year came Elmer's Candid Camera, which starred that nervous hero Elmer Fudd on a hunt for a "wabbit". The wabbit was the as yet unchristened Bugs Bunny, whose unique character Jones would help mould. "Bugs is a cross between Rex Harrison's Professor Higgins, D'Artagnan and Dorothy Parker, all stuffed into a rabbit skin" Jones said, later redefining the rabbit as "a cross between Groucho Marx and George Sanders".

A forgotten Jones hero is Conrad Cat who made his debut in The Bird Came C.O.D. (1941). This silent feline, later co-starring with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, managed to sing "We're Shovin' Right Off," a comical naval ditty, in Conrad the Sailor (1942). Another lost hero is half-pint Henery Hawk, a newly hatched chick in The Squawkin' Hawk (I942) who would spend some years doing his best to catch and eat fully-grown chicken hawks.

The first Jones cartoon to truly break with tradition was The Dover Boys (1942), a stylised satire, a form of humour new to animation, on Gay Nineties melodramas. Tom, Dick and Larry, brother students of Pimento University ("dear old P.U."), save their wayward sweetheart Dora Standpipe from the school bully, Dan Backslide. Drawn in a style totally new to cartoons, it is likely that it acted as an influence on those breakaway artists who would later found UPA (United Productions of America), home of Mister Magoo.

The Forties saw a huge renaissance in animated cartoons. Made now quite frankly for the enjoyment of servicemen far from home, they became faster, funnier and sexier. Jones was now an all-out slapstick comedian of the pencil, and even found time in his busy Warner schedule to direct several of the Private Snafu series, which every animation studio worked on for distribution to the Army and Navy only through their bi-weekly Screen Magazine. Created by Frank Capra, the character was developed by Jones, who directed the introductory trailer and several episodes including spies. Snafu was service slang for "situation normal – all fouled up". (Fouled was the censor's substitute for an even fouler word beginning with "f".)

In January 1945 Warners released the first cartoon to star Jones's new creation, Pepe le Pew, a French skunk who talked like Charles Boyer and would regularly make love to disguised cats. "Pepe was very much like me," said Jones. "Irresistible. He doesn't know he's a stinker!" Pepe's film, Odor able Kitty, would be followed in 1951 by For Scenti-Mental Reasons, winning Jones his first Academy Award. In all he won 14 Oscar nominations, three actual Oscars, plus in 1996 the Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Curiously, the characters he created which are best remembered as his finest achievements in animation failed to win an Oscar, despite their long run. And "run" is the operative word when it comes to pursuer Wile E. Coyote and pursued Road Runner, or as Latin would classify them in their first film, Fast and Furry-ous (1949), Carnivorous Vulgaris and Accelerati Incredibus. Road Runner was actually named "Beep-Beep", after the hooting noise he honked during runs. This soundbite came from a studio hand called Paul Julian, who honked vocally to clear the way as he carried bundles of backgrounds around the studio corridors.

Road Runner cartoons are displays of perfect animation, totally visual without the need of any verbal expressions or explanations. Each plot is basically the same: coyote tries to catch and eat fast galloping bird but, despite ever more elaborate means, he fails. Painfully. "Wiley," said Jones, "is somebody who redoubles his efforts when he's forgotten his aim."

In 1962 Warners closed their studios, destroyed the archive of artwork, and sold their cartoons to a television distributor. Easy to pour scorn today, but almost understandable at the time. Jones joined the producer Les Goldman to form an independent animation outfit, and talked MGM, who had also closed their in-house animation studio, into making a new run of Tom and Jerry cartoons. These were better than Gene Deitch's attempts made in Czechoslovakia, but oddly poor when compared to the great days of the Hanna-Barbera cat-and-mouse cartoons. Jones later admitted that his versions looked like Road Runner and Coyote in cat and mouse drag.

Jones next made an independent cartoon, The Dot and the Line (1964), a simplistic semi-documentary based on Norman Juster's book. This won him his third Oscar. He followed up with his first-ever attempt at a feature-length cartoon, The Phantom Tollbooth (1971), distributed through MGM. Lovingly animated, it reminded one more of Jones's early Merrie Melodies than his primetiming with the Road Runner.

From 1970 Jones moved into television, appointed Vice-President of the American Broadcasting Company's Children's Programming. He devised and produced a Saturday morning series called The Curiosity Shop. Later came a string of TV specials via Warner characters for the Columbia Broadcasting System. These were basically clever compilations linked with new sequences and included Bugs Bunny's Busting Out All Over (1980) and Daffy Duck's Thanksgiving Special (1981). In 1986 came an outstanding special celebrating the 50th anniversary of Looney Tunes.

Always active, Jones tried his pen at a syndicated strip, Crawford, in 1978, visited London in 1988 to paint a giant mural of Bugs Bunny and chums on the walls of the Museum of the Moving Image, and wrote his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, in 1989. At the age of 82 he contracted to make five new cartoons with Warner's characters, moving back into the old Termite Terrace lot. One was called Chariots of Fur and starred Canis Latrans and Geococcyx Californianus – Coyote and Road Runner to you.

Jones summed up his long career in cartoonery thus: "I've never thought of myself as an artist. That's a term someone else might give you. My main concern was simply to create pictures that made people laugh."

Denis Gifford

*Denis Gifford died 20 May 2000