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").