A TRUE GENIUS

He drew pictures of Bugs Bunny (Stefan Kanfer, Spring 2003, Vol. 13, No. 2, City Journal)

Chuck Jones, who departed last year at the age of 89, was a Hirschfeld fan. The admiration was mutual. Indeed, Hirschfeld once did the impossible—a caricature of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, two creatures Jones had immortalized in his animated cartoons. Like Al, Chuck showed his gifts early, but didn’t quite know what to do with them. His father, a Micawberesque speculator who failed in business after business but always believed that something would turn up, kept purchasing reams of stationery marked with the logos of his various enterprises. As each venture went belly-up, it furnished Chuck with all the drawing paper a boy could want.

Jones pere kept moving around Los Angeles, hoping that a new house would bring him luck. Many of those furnished rental homes came with shelves of books, so Chuck devoured the collected Dickens, Austen, Poe, Trollope, and Twain, along with rows of reference volumes. Novelist Ray Bradbury, his old friend, recalled, “Chuck always read the encyclopedia as if it were the latest best-seller. Whenever he called me up and asked, 'Did you know that when the engineers on the trans-Egyptian railway ran out of fuel they burned mummy cases?' I knew he’d been at the Britannica again.”

Hollywood was still in development during Chuck’s youth, and, when he wasn’t reading or sketching, he was peering through a fence, watching the Keystone Kops, Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin inventing their comedy before the cameras. Their pratfalls, along with the literary classics, became the cornerstones of Jones’s art. “I have always begun with reality,” he once recollected. “It’s something I learned from that great exponent of reality, Charles Dickens. People thought of him as an inventor, but the fact is that all his great characters have their feet firmly grounded on the streets, and sometimes in the gutter. I’ve met my share of Mr. Bumbles and Bill Sykeses in London, and there are plenty of Veneerings and Uriah Heeps right here in Hollywood.” [...]

A certain perversity attended the birth of many Chuck Jones cartoons. He concocted the hilarious “Bully for Bugs” because a Warner Brothers executive stated that there was nothing funny about a bullfight. He created Pepé because no one thought of a skunk as the least bit amorous. And he encouraged Mel Blanc to imitate a mogul’s lisp for the voice of Daffy Duck. Fortunately Leon Schlesinger was deaf to his own speech defect. Watching the rushes for the first time he exclaimed, “Jeethuth Chritht, that’th a funny voithe! Where’d you get that voithe?”

This whimsical attitude influenced Jones’s finest efforts—and there are a slew of them. “What’s Opera, Doc,” which heads the Motion Picture Academy’s list of the 50 Greatest Cartoons, simultaneously parodies Wagner’s Ring cycle (page 105) and Disney’s Fantasia. The standard cartoon of the period used some 60 different views of the action. “What’s Opera, Doc” had 140 because, in Jones’s words, “Basically what I wanted to do was squeeze all 14 hours of the cycle into a single cartoon, and drop in the X Factor—Bugs Bunny. To do all that meant that I had to give Wagner his due: elaborate sets, melodramatic lighting and a lot of different viewpoints. Plus a cast of superstars. After all, when a major figure is being satirized, he demands an outsize lampoon.”

Literary critic Hugh Kenner pronounced the effort “Joycean.” Audiences, he wrote, “know that when the figure who casts huge shadows on orange cliffs turns out to be Elmer Fudd, they’re simultaneously regarding a Fuddy emulation of the demon through whom Fantasia dramatized Moussorgsky’s violent music, and watching one more Fuddian attempt at grandiosity, and coping with an inept impersonation of Siegfried, and engaged with yet another episode of 'Kill the wabbit!' That’s four layers at least.” Such musings made Chuck Jones nervous, but he allowed there was some substance to them: “I know it sounds pretentious, but our most effective sequences always had literary, and sometimes theological, foundations. And we used classical music whenever possible. That’s why these little films have endured when so many longer ones have become antiques. We were cartooning on the shoulders of the great.”

Like pretty much anyone who's watched television the adventures of Bugs, Daffy, the Roadrunner, the Coyote and Yosemite Sam provided hours of enjoyment. I never realised so much craft went into the cartoons although in retrospect it seems obvious now. Posted by M Ali Choudhury at June 13, 2003 4:35 PM