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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