Show Business: The World Jones Made

He has made moviegoers laugh as often and as well as Chaplin or Keaton. His work, which has won three Oscars, is among the best of American film comedy. Yet he has never appeared onscreen, and his name—Charles M. Jones, when a producer wanted him to sound classy, or Chuck Jones, as he now prefers to bill himself—is scarcely known outside the movie business. Jones has spent his nearly 40-year career in the ebullient but usually anonymous medium of the animated cartoon.

His most fruitful years were with Warner Bros, in the ’40s and ’50s, when he played stepfather to existing characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and created such new ones as a warring Bear Family, a libidinous skunk called Pepe le Pew and, above all, the most popular animated figures since Donald Duck: the maddeningly capture-proof Road Runner and his perennially thwarted nemesis, the Coyote.

Cameo Perfection. In the 250 films that Jones has directed—most of them no more than six minutes long—he has laid waste the pretensions of grand opera (What’s Opera, Doc?, Rabbit of Seville), made black comedy out of nuclear warfare a decade before Dr. Strangelove (Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century), played with the mechanics of film making (Duck Amuck, which might be called the Persona of animated cartoons), and lampooned every movie genre from cops to swashbucklers. His One Froggy Evening, starring a mysterious singing frog called Michigan J., is a morality play in cameo that comes as close as any cartoon ever has to perfection.

As attested by The Hollywood Cartoon, a current retrospective series at the New York Cultural Center, Jones’ body of work is uniquely rich, subtle and inventive. His cartoons compare favorably in their vividness and variety with the best work from the Disney Studios. Perhaps they are not as innovative, but they are funnier, madder, certainly more deeply and consistently personal.

The son of a “frustrated gallant with Micawberish business instincts,” Jones was raised in Hollywood, where he worked occasionally as a child extra in Mack Sennett comedies. After graduation from art school, he supported himself by drawing pencil portraits for $1 apiece at a friend’s bookstore. From this he drifted into animation, more or less moseying up through the ranks of animation’s curious technocracy (eel washer, painter, inker, in-betweener), and began directing in 1938.

At the Warner Bros, animation unit —called with affection and realism “Termite Terrace”—the artists seemed to share the same zany verve that char acterized their creations. One of Jones’ co-workers used a heating element and zinc-lined drawers to make his desk into a hot-dog stand, with steam rising from every aperture. Others rigged up an elaborate early-warning system, complete with flashing red lights, to enable everyone to assume a busy air before the visits of a producer whose spluttering lisp furnished the inspiration for Daffy Duck’s voice (“Put in more jokes, fellowth”).

Jones and the other directors—Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery —gathered periodically for what they called the “Period of the Big Yes” to share story ideas, gags, gimmicks. “There were no negatives allowed for the duration of the two-hour meeting,” Jones recalls. “If you couldn’t say anything positive, you couldn’t talk at all.”

Jack Warner shut down the animation unit for a few years during the early ’50s when he thought that 3-D was the thing of the future. During the hiatus, Jones worked for Walt Disney, whom he admires (“the D.W. Griffith of animation”), but whose creative control he found restrictive. After a few more years of activity, the Warner Bros, animation unit was closed for good in 1962. Since then Jones has worked mostly on TV, producing a syndicated series called The Curiosity Shop and directing an occasional half-hour animated special, like the sweetly eccentric A Very Merry Cricket, to be shown on ABC this Friday (8 to 8:30 p.m., E.S.T.).

Directing a cartoon, like directing a full-length movie, requires total immersion in every aspect of the creation. Jones worked on the story with the writer, made all the important drawings himself, supervised the background painting, even collaborated on the sound effects and music. He habitually speaks of his characters as if they were people (“The Coyote fulfills Santayana’s definition of a fanatic—someone who redoubles his efforts when he’s forgotten his aim”). Moreover, he thinks of them as people who make ideal actors: they can achieve any facial expression or gesture the director desires, thus freeing him to create “pure cinema.” Jones insists on using full animation, which requires more time and expense than the so-called limited animation often seen on TV on Saturday mornings, in which sometimes nothing moves but the mouths, and the same static backgrounds are employed repeatedly.

This is part of the reason why Warner Bros, remains deaf to Jones’ urgings that it resume cartoon production. Indeed, Warner’s has burned its original cartoon art to make storage space and has sold off the TV rights to the characters at a cheap rate. Jones, at 61 a gentle, whimsical figure with a Carl Sandburg forelock, is far from hard up. Father of a daughter, grandfather of three, he shuttles between his Hollywood offices and a home in the Burbank hills and weekends at a house overlooking the Pacific, which he shares with Dorothy, his wife for 35 years. But he longs to return to the dervish comedy and captivating anarchy of his earlier cartoons. After all, he explains, “those characters are extensions of myself —what I am or want to be.” “·Jay Cocks