On a weekday afternoon in 1972 I visited a fellow film aficionado in his Los Angeles home. Several other people interested in film were also there. Suddenly, at 3 PM, everyone gathered around an old black-and-white television. A longtime auteurist, I wondered what obscure classic was commanding their attention. It turned out to be a daily show of Hollywood cartoons from the 40s and 50s–everyone was trying to guess the directors. I remember thinking, “This is taking auteurism too far.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In recent years, Warner Brothers has begun capitalizing on the work created by Jones and others, selling animation cels and other products and licensing the characters’ use in commercials. Jones, still going strong at 88, does the same at www.chuckjones.com, which also has a complete filmography. The cartoons can be seen on television, but much is lost there. Jones’s art depends on establishing and then disrupting space and rhythm–you have to be moved by the illusionistic power of the setup. When one of Wile E. Coyote’s contraptions collapses on him, the impact of the event depends on establishing its physical presence, an illusion undercut by video. And cartoons’ solid, saturated colors are arguably more altered by the tiny lines of video than textured human faces are.
Born in Spokane, Jones got his start in the 1930s helping create animation cels. His first cartoons as director, beginning in 1938, showed a Disney influence, but he soon diverged from that aesthetic; indeed, much of Warner Brothers’ output seems intentionally opposed to smooth, syrupy, sanitized Disney cartoons, where cute and cuddly characters are the norm. Jones’s cartoons are full of sharp breaks, abrupt transitions, troubling contradictions; their look and feel and space are as broken and ragged as the coyote’s fur just after he’s been scorched by one of his own explosions. In Jones’s disturbed world, characters are less likely to have their conflicts resolved than to end up in a “Psychopathic Hospital.”
Long-Haired Hare (1949) is one of many superb Jones music cartoons in which the synchronization of music and action is bizarrely exaggerated, contra Disney’s attempts at seamlessness. Bugs begins happily singing, accompanying himself on the banjo, “What do they do on a rainy night in Rio?” He’s overheard in the nearby home of rehearsing opera singer Giovanni Jones, who’s enraged to find himself suddenly singing “What do they do in Mississippi / When skies are drippy?” He goes out and smashes the banjo on Bugs’s head.
