Bringing the Animators to Life

Ain’t no animator or animation fan alive who won’t devour, cover-to-cover in one happy read, CHUCK AMUCK: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $24.95; 304 pp.), Chuck Jones’ long-awaited autobiography. Autobiography is actually too formal a word for this delightfully informal literary achievement; it’s really a surprise package--part memoir (selective and sharp), part sketchbook (juicy drawings), part scrapbook (telling snapshots), part how-to-animate manual, and all wonderful.

Jones, as everybody knows, is one of the world’s great cartoon directors, a master of what he calls “that golden atom, that single frame of action, that 1/24 of a second.” His Warner Bros. shorts defined and refined the personalities of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner and Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, et al., and expanded the emotional and entertainment perimeters of animation. Jones’ films brim with marvelous characters, precise timing, ironic humor, slapstick, warmth and fun, and it is a pleasure to report that his book does, too.

Who else but Chuck Jones would cite, as the first step in his destiny to become an animation director, a stray cat he met at age 7? Johnson “sat fat and walked thin like other cats,” but, as Jones hilariously recounts, he was special, a feisty, grapefruit-devouring surfer-cat, a cat with a distinctive personality who taught Jones “that first and most important lesson of animation individuality.”

Jones also recalls as career-markers the influence of a favorite uncle, who told outrageous but entirely believable bedtime stories; his father’s hatred of verbal ostentation; and Mark Twain, who “used words the way the graphic artist uses line control.” His art school teacher Don Graham (“patron saint of animation”) helped Jones equate drawing with “having fun”--and audiences have been the beneficiaries of that advice ever since.

Jones’ animator’s eye and descriptive powers have the sharpness of a scalpel when he leads a tour of Warners’ “rabbit factory” circa 1946 (“an old building, more of a loft, a moldy beehive, dry and dusty”). His remembrances of his co-workers are intimate and affectionate regarding their artistic gifts and human foibles, from fellow cartoon directors Friz Freleng and Tex Avery, to writers Tedd Pierce and Mike Maltese, musician Carl Stalling and designer Maurice Noble, various animators, and others.

He saves the acid for members of the front office, such as a business manager “whose intellect was far, far below that of sphagnum moss.” Producer Leon Schlesinger, “a sort of snazzily dressed gila monster in a panama hat,” obviously fascinated and repulsed Jones simultaneously. In a screening room to review the latest Daffy Duck (and unaware that the Duck’s lisp was modeled after his own), Schlesinger barked “Roll the garbage!” to the projectionist, as his “frog-belly white buttocks” graced a gilt throne “snatched from some early Warner pseudo-De Mille film.” The only non-creative member of the Warners staff to escape Jones’ verbal arrows is Russell, an old arthritic black janitor, who is memorialized in a touching portrait.

Jones’ book should be required reading by all animators--students as well as pros. It is packed with information about the making of animated cartoons using several of Jones’ blockbusters as examples. A natural-born teacher, Jones carefully demonstrates his philosophical and technical points with scripts, layouts, sketches, comparative anatomy (as demonstrated by striped socks and tennis shoes on a kangaroo, tree sloth, Percheron and others), delicious doodles and caricatures, and even a 279-page flip-book of a classic Roadrunner/Coyote chase to be enjoyed (and studied) over and over again.

Jones banishes his chronology to an appendix at the back of the book, and makes a joke of it. But it is all there, including a complete directorial filmography, a list of Jones’ earliest animation, and a recounting of his many tributes and awards.

On the last page of “Chuck Amuck” is a photo of the bearded artist at age 77, looking remarkably like his 7-year-old self seated on an ornate tricycle in the first chapter, even to the tilted position of his head. Jones’ continuing connection with his playful child-self throughout his life is an important component of his success, as this joyful book so ably shows. One finishes Jones’ book wanting to read more, but satisfied and, as he writes of his beloved Uncle Lynn’s tales, “all at peace with the world and ready for bed after such a wonderful, believable story with such a satisfactory ending.”

Ted Sennett’s THE ART OF HANNA-BARBERA: Fifty Years of Creativity (Viking Studio Books: $50; 288 pp.), is the ultimate corporate brochure, disguised as an art book. This overblown studio-sanctioned tome, with its oxymoronic title, praises with faint damning the cartoon films of the team that ushered in animation’s Iron Age.

The book is as elaborate as any of Disney’s art books, with color and imaginative layouts on every one of its 288 pages. There is even a triptych foldout guide to 49 H&B; animated “stars,” which is typical of the book’s muscular hype; for the term “star” becomes meaningless when applied to minor characters, such as “Squiddly Diddly” and “Fluid Man.” So, too, is the term art debased when represented by a flood of mind-numbing graphics that give new meaning to the word mediocre.

The most interesting part of the book is the history section tracing the pre-television careers of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. At MGM, they produced Tom and Jerry shorts for 17 years, films which, despite a sameness, are remembered for excellent personality animation and fine production values. (Jerry the Mouse dancing with Gene Kelly in 1945’s “Anchors Aweigh” still outshines Roger Rabbit in the charm department.) Even here the book overkills with a slew of stills of Tom chasing Jerry, of which the only discernible difference is a change of Tom’s fur color from taupe to blue.

When the market for theatrical cartoons dried up, H&B; devised a system of “planned” or “limited” animation that allowed them to economically produce animation for television on a massive scale. “Although a loss of lifelike and richly varied detail was inevitable,” notes “Art of Hanna-Barbera” author Ted Sennett, “the savings in time and money were incalculable.” Limited and repetitive though they were, H&B;’s shows and characters of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s (including Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones and the Jetsons) were amusing and are fondly remembered by a generation of television viewers. (True-blue, die-hard H&B; fans may want to spring for the signed $300 limited edition of this book with slip-case.) But this period, which might be termed H&B;’s “High Renaissance,” is only the first half of “The Art of Hanna-Barbera.”

The remaining 150 pages is post-Jetsons, when H&B; became (as they refer to themselves) “the General Motors of Animation.” Sennett’s text is reduced to a laundry list of titles and straight-faced descriptions of astonishingly bland and redundant TV series plots and characters. The kitsch graphics have an almost cynical coldness, impersonality and artlessness, as exemplified by a two-page spread of “Papa Smurf” giving his blessing to “Laconia” and “Woody” in “Smurfily Ever After.”

In the elegant and informative AMERICA’S GREAT COMIC-STRIP ARTISTS (Abbeville Press: $55), Richard Marschall discusses 16 artists who represent “the best of the best” of a “uniquely American art form”: the comic strip. By profiling each cartoonist’s life and work, from R.F. Outcault to Charles M. Schulz, Marschall also presents a succinct overview of the history of the comics from their beginings in the 1890s to the present.

During the art form’s experimental period before 1910, there were giants roaming the length and breadth of Sunday color pages, men such as Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Frederick Burr Opper and Winsor McCay. “It was a remarkable piece of luck,” observes Marschall, “that the comic strip was blessed from its inception with an array of talent that secured its foundations.” These innovators established and popularized the comic strip, and gave it a richness impossible to duplicate today.

The vitality, humor and inventiveness of this work is always impressive, and one shares the author’s sense of loss over the fate of today’s strips, with their poor color quality, shrunken formats, crowded pages and imitative ideas. “Commerce,” he says, “once such a benign partner, today smothers the newspaper comic strip in America.”

George Herriman and his brilliant Krazy Kat are, of course, represented here, and so is the craftsmanship of Harold Gray (“Little Orphan Annie”) and Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”), the abstractions of Cliff Starrett (“Polly and Her Pals”), the adventure strip experiments of Roy Crane (“Wash Tubbs”), and the social satire of Al Capp (“Li’l Abner”) and Walt Kelly (“Pogo”), among others.

The art in “America’s Great Comic Strip Artists” was reproduced from original drawings and vintage Sunday pages, many from author/historian Marschall’s personal collection. It is a pleasure to see the comics so well reproduced once again and so intelligently discussed.