Th-Th-That’s Not All, Warner Bros.! : Chuck Jones Is Back, Teaching an Old Studio Some New Cartoons

Nearly 32 years after the fabled Warner Bros. animation unit was shut down, leaving Chuck Jones hanging in midair, the veteran animator is once again turning out theatrical cartoons for the studio that gave birth to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and dozens of other familiar characters.

First out of the gate from Chuck Jones Film Productions: “Chariots of Fur,” the first Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon directed by Jones in more than three decades.

The seven-minute cartoon featuring the two popular Jones-created characters is showing with the Warner Bros. feature “Richie Rich.”

Four more theatrical cartoons are in production, and Jones, a longtime Corona del Mar resident, ultimately hopes to boost his production slate to 10 a year.

Don’t assume the legendary animator has come out of retirement to lead his 16-member staff of young artists. At 82, the man who started in animation at age 19 is busy as ever.

Over the past two decades, Jones has done a cartoon feature (“The Phantom Tollbooth”) for MGM, where he also directed more than 30 Tom and Jerry theatrical cartoons in the 1960s and early ‘70s. He continued directing animated cartoon specials for television through the ‘80s, and he directed an animated sequence for “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

Since 1976 he has been turning out limited-edition animation cels, which are sold in two Chuck Jones Showrooms in Corona del Mar and Santa Fe, N.M. Since 1992, he has been producing signed, limited-edition cells for the more than 100 Warner Bros. Studio Stores.

Jones also wrote a 1989 book, “Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist” and is in the middle of writing another, “How to Draw From the Fun Side of Your Brain.”

He recently created the characters for “Peter and the Wolf,” which was released in December as a book and interactive CD-ROM and is now in production in England as a one-hour animated and live-action film for television and home video.

“No, there’s no retirement. There never was,” said Jones, seated in a Chuck Jones Productions office in a sleek high-rise overlooking the Warner lot. “Retiring is absurd--that’s a sure way to die. I know enough of my friends who have indeed taken that route, and most of them are across the river here” at Forest Lawn cemetery.

“There seems to be no limit to his energy,” said his daughter, producer Linda Jones Clough.

Jones has won three Academy Awards and numerous other prizes for his animated cartoons. Steven Spielberg has called him a “comic genius, up there with Keaton and Mack Sennett,” and Newsweek dubbed him “one of America’s great filmmakers.”

In February, Jones received his latest tribute: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Though “honored,” his first impulse when asked his reaction to receiving the star was to joke, “Well, I think it’s a very good thing for people to put out their cigarettes.”

With his gray goatee, brown tweed sport coat, vest, bow tie and cane, this dapper elder statesman of the cartoon business resembles a Parisian boulevardier.

The affable Jones shows up at his production offices in Burbank “whenever they need me,” anywhere from one to three days a week. And he arrives in style: in a chauffeur-driven limousine supplied by Warner Bros.

“It’s part of the deal; I couldn’t drive back and forth all the time,” said Jones, who spends the more than one-hour drive writing and making notes.

The next Jones-directed cartoon, which is expected to be released this summer with “Batman Forever,” is “Another Froggy Evening.” It stars Michigan J. Frog, the high-stepping song-and-dance amphibian last seen in his 1956 debut cartoon, “One Froggy Evening.”

Warner Bros. picked the character as its corporate mascot for its new television network, and a giant-sized Michigan J. Frog perches on the studio’s water tower.

Jones is not the only veteran from the golden era of animation at work today. Disney’s Joe Grant, 86, has worked on the upcoming “Pocahontas” and several other recent feature-length animated features. And Maurice Noble, the 84-year-old former Warner Bros. animation art director, did the art design on “Chariots of Fur.”

But, Jones acknowledges, there are not many old guys still at it.

“It’s a pity too,” he said, adding that former top Disney animators “Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are lecturing and so on, but nobody’s using them in a creative way. But Warner Bros. doesn’t seem to be too in a state of shock from hiring an old man.

“But as I like to quote old Oliver Wendell Holmes--when somebody asked him how it felt to be an old man, he said, ‘I don’t feel like an old man; I feel like a young man that has something the matter with him.’ ”

Jones’ goal in supplying theatrical cartoons for Warner Bros. is to create an atmosphere in which new directors and animators can ultimately take over what he’s doing.

“You see,” he said, “I’m not here to make pictures. I’m here to develop a new unit of young people. If you want to put it very simply, my job here is to get rid of me.”

His intention, he said, is to re-create the spirit of Termite Terrace, as the old Warner Bros. animation headquarters was called during the golden days when his colleagues included Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Frank Tashlin and Robert McKimson.

“My job, as I understand it,” he said, “is to develop the same spirit that existed (then) and have new adventures with the old characters and new adventures with new characters.”

Jones figures the average age of the artists who animated “Chariots of Fur” is 25 to 30, “which is exactly what it was when we came in. When I came in I was 19 years old and our interns are probably about that age. The old man in the business was Walt Disney; he was 29. It’s hard to believe Walt, before he was 40, had completed ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ‘Fantasia.’

“The story here is really not that I’m back making (theatrical) cartoons, because how long can I make them? I don’t know. Hopefully, until I’m 170, but I can’t really depend on that. I do feel that because of my age I should take into consideration that the best thing I can do is generate a new Termite Terrace spirit: the spirit of young people willing to do daring things, not to try to please management, not to try to please an audience.

“If you try to please an audience you’re going to fail, because you don’t know who the audience is. But if you try to obey your instincts and you’re surrounded by talented people, then indeed you’ll do something.”