COUNTDOWN TO THE OSCARS : Nothing Daffy About Jones Getting an Oscar

Who is Chuck Jones? The short answer: the mad genius behind Bugs Bunny.

The long answer will be offered Monday night by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the form of a tribute to the 82-year-old animation artist and director, culminating in the presentation by Robin Williams of an honorary Oscar in recognition of exceptional career achievement.

Charles Martin Jones created or was instrumental in creating such classic creatures as Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig and Pepe Le Pew, to name some of the looniest. His significance is summed up by one of his lifelong collaborators, background designer Maurice Noble, 84, who got his first screen credit on Walt Disney’s “Snow White.”

“I would rank Chuck right up there with Walt,” Noble says.

Perhaps the grandest assessment comes from Hugh Kenner, a literary scholar and biographer noted for his critical studies of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Kenner, who also has written a book on Jones, calls him not just “a great artist”--the equal of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton--but “a creative genius in a wholly new medium” and a key innovator in a brilliant period of animation art comparable to “the brief flowering of Periclean Athens.”

“Fortunately for us, we didn’t know it,” Jones replied recently, with a boyish smile bordering on a cat-ate-the-canary smirk.

“I never strove for success,” Jones said, “any more than I strove to win an honorary Oscar. That’s pudding. Nobody figured animation would go anyplace. I only wanted to do what I enjoyed. I didn’t have any ambitions. When I came out of art school and somebody offered to pay me to draw, that’s all I ever asked for.”

Tall, balding, wearing a gray goatee and freckled from a lifetime of too much sun, Jones cuts a figure somewhere between a bohemian and a boulevardier. He was sitting at a glass-topped desk with a silver-handled cane at his side in a Corona del Mar gallery devoted to his work. He comes here regularly from his oceanside home nearby. He also commutes several times a week to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where he heads a new animation unit.

“The awards are raining down,” he observed. “I think they’re trying to get them in before I go to Forest Lawn.”

Earlier this month, the Directors Guild gave Jones its Honorary Life Member Award. (Director D.W. Griffith, one of Hollywood’s founders, was the first recipient in 1938.)

“Now that award is quite an accolade because it comes from people who are very accomplished in their field. This isn’t necessarily true of the motion picture academy--though the Oscar they’re giving me is from the board of governors, so I guess they’re competent.”

From 1933 to 1963, Jones worked out of an old bungalow dubbed Termite Terrace on the Warners lot, along with the prolific Friz Freleng and Tex Avery. They were the main competition for Disney, turning out hundreds of labor-intensive, hand-drawn cartoons (each six minutes long) for theatrical release.

Jones directed 208 of them--that is, he defined the characters and set them in motion with his expert sketches, helped write the story line and guided the actors who did the voices (chiefly the fabled Mel Blanc).

The result was a menagerie of creatures living in a surreal world that both obeyed and comically defied the laws of physics. But it was Jones’ unique sensibility--a combination of absurdist humor, dazzling draughtsmanship and intellectual exploration--that informed the entire process and ultimately gave birth to a parallel universe as human as our own.

In 1995, more than 1,000 animators, cartoon historians and animation professionals rated their favorites for “The Fifty Greatest Cartoons,” a book edited by Jeffrey Beck. Four of the top five turned out to be Jones’: “What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957); “Duck Amuck” (1953); “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century” (1953); and “One Froggy Evening” (1955). Moreover, “What’s Opera, Doc?” is one of a handful of animation cartoons chosen to date by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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Jones, whose conversation is peppered with literary references, quoted from a Robert Frost poem:

My object in life is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

“That’s a beautiful analogy,” he continued. “How many people get to make their hobby and their work the same thing?”

Jones prefers to think of himself as a trivia collector who stores up oddities of human nature: “I don’t pick out things I think are funny. I accumulate them, and I read. If you read the master, Mark Twain, you get all the information you could possibly use, because he doesn’t coach you to be funny; he coaches you how to think, period.

“Comedy is all mistakes,” he said. “All slippages. Aberrant behavior is all that counts. It’s the only thing that makes somebody interesting. If you act the way everybody else does, it’s not interesting.”

Jones recalled that at art school just before the Depression--he graduated from Chouinard, which later became the California Institute of the Arts--he was told, “Don’t look for the way things should be; look for the way things are.”

Jones has taken that for a highly personal aesthetic credo: “Let me make it vivid: If you’re an alligator, learn to draw alligators; if you’re a man, learn to draw humans.”

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Shifting gears, he paraphrased philosopher George Santayana to describe his balletic duo Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner: “A fanatic redoubles his effort once he loses sight of his goal.” Hence, the maniacal Coyote, out of his mind with hunger, is destined to chase his prey, the Road Runner, forever.

“What you look for is not how to catch a Road Runner, but how not to catch him. With Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, the trick is not to shoot a rabbit; it’s how the rabbit avoids being shot. Bugs being what he is--a cross between Dorothy Parker, Professor Higgins and Douglas Fairbanks--that’s easy. He’d rather talk his way out of a jam, anyway.”

Jones being what he is, of course, merely will be reminded by Monday’s Oscar of his place in Hollywood’s pantheon. Or as Daffy Duck, the envious egotist who once dreamed of getting an Oscar himself, might say: “Dethpicable!”