Initial Thoughts on Chuck Jones and Warner Brothers Cartoons

I often ask myself where my love of film stems from. At an early age I was already watching classic movies that usually starred my favorite actor Jimmy Stewart. At 13 I saw "Jurassic Park" five times in a movie theatre and at that moment wanted to see everything directed by Steven Spielberg. But even before all that my film education started every Saturday morning with a little program called "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show". There were other cartoons on every Saturday morning, but Bugs Bunny was not to be missed, I would watch it regularly and even as I grew older, perhaps too old for Saturday morning cartoons, I would still watch Bugs.

The thing people tend to forget, and something I didn't know until later on in life was that all those Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd etc... were never made for kids. They were adult cartoons shown for adult audiences before the beginning of a feature film. Showing cartoons in a movie theatre was common practice back in the 30s and 40s just as annoying commercials are shown to us today.

Warner Brothers cartoons had the cream of the crop as far as creative personnel went. I could easily discuss the early cartoons composed by Tex Avery, Bob Clampett or Frank Tashlin who stretched animation to the far reaches of surrealism. Their films I would say became the most influential regarding the Warner Brother's style. It took directors such as Friz Freling, Robert McKimmson, and of course Chuck Jones to refine that style into the more character oriented cartoons of later years. While all these directors did brilliant work, it was always Jones who stuck out the most for me. Even as a kid I knew the name Chuck Jones, he was always the one who's name came at the beginning of every road runner cartoon (this was probably even before I knew what a director was).

Jones was thought of as the intellectual of the group, he was an artist who had ambitions of studying in Paris, and never thought of becoming an animator. Jones' early films were always less crude and slower paced than that of Clampett's and Avery's. Producer Leon Schlesinger told Jones he had to pick up the pace a bit and add more humour, to which Jones eventually did.

After Avery and Clampett left the studio, their innovative style layed the groundwork for the rest of the directors to refine. The cartoons became more character based rather than gag-dependent, and this was something Jones excelled at in his best cartoons. Jones would be mainly responsible for creating the characters and relationships we see today in Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd, no more so than in his famous "Rabbit Seasoning" trilogy which was a series of cartoons where Daffy would always try to trick Elmer into thinking it was Rabbit Season rather than Duck season, but of course Bugs would always get the last laugh. This series of cartoons depended greatly on character reactions and word play, rather than someone being blown up with a stick of dynamite.

In Jones' "Duck Amuck", he plays with animated convention as he puts Daffy Duck through the ringer when a sadistic animator doesn't play by the rules.

For Jones also nothing was sacred to parody including opera which he demonstrated with what many call his masterpiece "What's Opera Doc?" and my personal favorite the underrated "The Rabbit of Seville". In both these cases, Jones uses Opera as a backdrop for the usual Elmer vs. Bugs plots.



When I look at a Chuck Jones cartoon today, there's always something a little more subversive and sophisticated in his work that I think holds up better today than some of the others, which might be why he is probably the best known of the bunch. Jones seemed to be preoccupied the most with character. After watching a documentary recently on Jones, he was giving an animation lesson and showed how he would go about drawing Bugs Bunny. "Here's the fun part" he would say as he got to the eyes and facial expression. Jones was known for subtle eyebrow lifts or little snickers on the mouth to depict the character's mood.

Animation is something that can be taken for granted, we are more apt to go to live action films and praise those people involved with creating such unique stories and actors for giving such sympathetic characters. With animation it's easier to suspend our belief, but wouldn't it be more difficult to be asked to sympathize with a rabbit, or a duck, or a pig? That's just what animators are asked to do even to this day. Chuck Jones created worlds that toyed with the rules of reality and helped create an animated language that people still are using today. He's as innovative with comedy as Buster Keaton, and shows a wit in his films not unlike those in Marx Brothers movies. If it weren't for Chuck Jones and the other genius animators at Warner Brothers, the whole aspect of film might've been lost on me.