The Daffy World of Chuck Jones : An animated discussion about the cartoons and the characters of the influential Oscar-winner who’s still going ‘Amuck’ at 77

“If you were a young art student in 1931, the only thing you could really conceive of doing was graduating, going to Paris, getting a place among the chimney pots, painting and dying at some ancient age like 37--sort of like a male Camille,” says Chuck Jones with a characteristic laugh. “But I came to the horrid realization that it costs money to die poor: You’ve got to get to Paris, rent an apartment, buy all those cobwebs--the whole bit.”

The then 19-year-old graduate of the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles never realized his romantic dream of painting and dying young in Paris, and the arts of animation and film comedy are richer for it.

He got a job as a cel washer at the Ub Iwerks Studio in Beverly Hills, cleaning the ink off sheets of acetate so they could be reused. This humble beginning led to a brilliant career in animation: Jones went on to create Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and Pepe LePew, and to direct many of the best cartoons with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd.

He won three Oscars, a Peabody Award and ASIFA/Hollywood’s Annie Award, and has been honored by the British Film Institute, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and film festivals all over the world.

A longtime resident of Newport Beach, Jones, now 77, chronicled his life and career in his recent book “Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist” (Farrar Straus Giroux). Rambling, informal and very funny, part memoir, part sketchbook and part how-to-animate manual, “Chuck Amuck” has received rave reviews in magazines and newspapers across the country.

Animators usually are portrayed as tongue-tied artists who can communicate only through their drawings, or as loony-bin zanies whose antics rival their characters. Jones shatters both stereotypes: In person, he is articulate, witty and charming.

He discusses animation, literature, art history and politics with equal zest, and quotes Santayana’s definition of a fanatic (“One who redoubles his effort after he loses sight of his goal”) to describe Wile E. Coyote’s monomaniac pursuit of the Road Runner. The improbable pairing of the author of “Realms of Being” with the hilariously inept Coyote sums up the breadth of Jones’ interests.

The cels-washing job didn’t last long: Jones soon was promoted to assistant animator, then full-fledged animator. He worked briefly for Charles Mintz and Walter Lantz before settling down at the Leon Schlesinger studio, making Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

“Coming out of art school during the Depression, the idea of getting a job was surprising,” Jones recalls. “The idea of getting a job doing something you liked was beyond belief.”

Promoted to director in 1938, Jones made his best films after World War II when he, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson each headed a unit at Warner Bros., turning out 10 six-minute cartoons a year. All three directors used many of the same characters and gags, but they approached the material differently.

The hallmarks of Jones’ mature style are crispness, clarity and subtlety. Of the Warner directors, he was the most strongly influenced by the Disney films, especially the appealing designs and vivid character animation of master animator Fred Moore. Tex Avery might make a character’s eyes swell to the size of searchlights, or fly across the room to ogle a pretty girl; Jones would have the character glance quickly at the audience or flicker an eyebrow. He cites the influence of Buster Keaton and the other great silent comics on his use of body language and expressions that make the characters in his films seem like living, thinking beings.

“I went on the supposition--although I probably wasn’t able to verbalize it--that every character I worked with had to come from inside myself,” he explains. “To make a heroic allusion, Laurence Olivier said he never had to leave himself when he acted; similarly, Daffy Duck is inside me. So is Bugs Bunny, in the sense that he’s what I’d like to be, but Daffy is what I know full well I am: You can dream about being Bugs, but when you look in the mirror in the morning, you see Daffy.

“I learned the first thing you need to have in a film is believability,” he continues. “Believability is the character standing there on the ground--which poses the same problem Degas and all painters have: The viewer has to believe that character is really standing there, that he’s part of the Earth, with weight. If a character’s believable, you can try to evoke sympathy for him. The audience has to care about the people they’re watching for you to create lasting humor. Believability, sympathy (through character development) and humor are the way to tickle people and make them laugh.”

It’s easy to spot these ideas at work in Jones’ postwar films such as “One Froggy Evening,” “Duck Amuck,” “Rabbit of Seville,” “Long-Haired Hare,” “A Bear for Punishment” and “Robin Hood Daffy.” It’s extremely difficult to communicate subtle nuances of expression and behavior in animation, and many of the best young animators cite Jones as an important influence on their own work.

“You couldn’t hope for a better example of the pure principles of animation at work than Chuck Jones’ cartoons,” says Duncan Majoribanks, who did the key animation of Sebastian, the calypso-voiced crab in Disney’s current release “The Little Mermaid.” “What I love best about his films is the acting: His characters are the most fully rounded personalities ever animated--they’re at least the equal of any live actors of the period.”

“In a lot of his films, Jones makes the character think about what he’s doing before he does it, as opposed to just moving the character around,” agrees Nik Ranieri, who did animation for both “Little Mermaid” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” “Even if the character’s not speaking, you can see the thought process going on. His films have definitely influenced my own work in the way I approach a scene and act it out: I try to keep the subtlety of his approach in mind, and get the idea across in one drawing as opposed to a violent action.”

The influence of his comic timing, especially in the Road Runner-Coyote series, extends into the realm of live-action film making. Steven Spielberg (who wrote the forward to “Chuck Amuck”), Peter Bogdanovich and Joe Dante are among the directors who pay tribute to Jones’ work. The kids in Dante’s “Gremlins” attended Charles Martin Jones Jr. High School.

“I don’t look back to specific moments in cartoons to imitate in my films, but there is a general sense of timing you pick up watching cartoons,” Dante says. “Cartoons and features are very different, especially spatially, but verbal timing is very important in both, and the timing in Chuck’s dialogue scenes is really unmatched. I’ve often thought that Chuck could have been a good feature director. If he had the kind of rapport with actors that he did with animators and voice people, he would have made some interesting films.”

Jones appears and acts considerably younger than his 77 years. In addition to signing hundreds of books, he keeps busy advising on films, drawing and painting. One of his current projects is a series of lithographs of the Warners characters, done in the style of various Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. His most recent Christmas card was a deft spoof of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, with Daffy Duck as La Golue.

He insists that he didn’t plan on writing “Chuck Amuck” until his wife, Marian Dern Jones, who used to write the syndicated comic strip “Rick O’Shay,” started a book on their life together, “How Can I Kiss You When I’m Laughing.”

“She did a great beginning on it, so we put a dummy together and took it to New York,” he says. “But the publishers there said, ‘She’s writing about somebody nobody knows about: We figure it’d be a good idea for you to write a book first, to justify her writing one.’ So that’s how it all started. Nothing’s ever done for the logical reason, is it?”