That’s Not All, Folks

During the heyday of the short cartoon, so an old story goes, a young animation artist who had landed a job at “Termite Terrace,” the ramshackle Hollywood cartoon studio of producer Leon Schlesinger, wrote to his family explaining that he had been hired to write jokes for Bugs Bunny. The fellow’s grandmother reportedly wrote back: “Bugs Bunny is funny enough on his own; why does he need you?”

For much of the history of American animation, the artists behind the cartoon laughter were no better known or appreciated than the young man in the story. While things have improved in the last two decades, it is still rare fort cartoon creators to be hailed as true filmmakers and fine artists. For that reason alone, “Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, A Life in Animation,” which airs Wednesday under PBS’ “Great Performances” umbrella, is a unique video document.

Charles M. “Chuck” Jones, who recently celebrated his 88th birthday, is probably the best-known cartoon director around, due in part to his honorary Oscar in 1996. Through his quarter-century as director of more than 200 classic Warner Bros. cartoons and beyond, he has become a legendary figure to animation buffs and an inspiration to a generation of mainstream filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Still, serious examinations of his artistry have been scarce, a situation that documentarian Margaret Selby set out to remedy. “I want people to respect animation, and I want people to respect Chuck Jones,” says Selby of New York’s CAMI Spectrum, the media and TV division of Columbia Artists Management Inc. She produced, directed and co-wrote (the latter with animation historian Greg Ford) “Extremes and In-Betweens.” “He’s an American treasure, a living legend, and we need to honor him,” she adds.

Jones, who was feted at a gala birthday bash at Warner Bros. Studios in September that doubled as the premiere screening of the documentary, has nothing but praise for the production. “The picture was beautiful, though I thought the subject matter was really weird,” he says with a laugh.

When asked for his thoughts about how the documentary positions him as a major, and influential, creative artist of the 20th century, he adds: “You dare not suggest that that’s the truth.”

Even so, it is hard to overestimate the impact Jones has had on popular culture. “Extremes and In-Betweens” got its name from two kinds of animation drawings--extremes being a character’s key performance poses, and in-betweens, drawn by junior animators, the drawings that link them in the action. The title fits, as the film examines every aspect of Jones’ career and the art of making animated shorts.

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One of a family of artistic children blessed with supportive parents, the teenaged Jones was allowed to leave high school and enroll in L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute. His first job in the animation business was as a cel washer--someone who cleans the ink and paint off a celluloid sheet so it can be reused--for the short-lived studio of Walt Disney’s (temporarily) roving right-hand man Ub Iwerks. It is doubtful that in 1934, when Jones landed at Schlesinger’s Hollywood studio, which was making Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros., Jones had any idea of the impact that would result. (Warner Bros. eventually bought Schlesinger out and moved the cartoon operation to the main lot in Burbank.)

Jones was elevated to the position of director (which at that time was called supervisor) in 1937. While his compatriots--including directors Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Bob Clampett--were exploring increasingly zany counterattacks to the heartfelt but soft Disney cartoons, Jones’ first directorial efforts were exactly in that softer Disney mold. But there was a reason: He needed to discover how the Disney style worked so that he could move on.

“I was pretty young then--I was only 24--and I had been raised and had read so much that acting was emotional,” Jones says. “I realized that the emotion was the thing that had to be.”

Jones’ true style and unerring comic timing began to emerge in the early 1940s, specifically with a 1943 short titled “The Dover Boys” that was quite radical for the time in its use of extreme character posing and “smear” animation--like the blurred movement that accompanies most of the Road Runner’s runs--for comic effect. Before long, he was turning out one gem after another, including a series of riotous Bear Family cartoons, which Matt Groening refers to in the documentary as “the American dysfunctional family predating [Groening’s own] ‘The Simpsons.’ ” And there were Jones shorts featuring personal creations Pepe Le Pew, the Road Runner and Marvin the Martian.

Jones’ ace unit, which included story man Mike Maltese, layout artist Maurice Noble and top-flight animators Ken Harris and Ben Washam, was also responsible for some of the studio’s most popular Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck shorts, including “The Rabbit of Seville,” “Duck Amuck” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century.”

According to Selby--whose background had largely been in making films about dance--cramming so much career into one 90-minute film was a daunting task. But having accepted the challenge of putting Jones’ life and work on film from writer and animation historian Stefan Kanfer (who is credited as a creative consultant), she immersed herself in the art form in general and Jones in particular.

“I read and saw everything Chuck ever did, I really did,” she says, “and what I wanted to do here was let the creator speak about his work. I really wanted him to set the record straight.”

Indeed, Jones serves as the documentary’s featured speaker, though Selby also engaged an A-list supporting cast, including such Jones fans as Spielberg, Joe Dante, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams; top animation pros John Lasseter, Eric Goldberg and Glen Keane; and such former co-workers as Noble, character and background designer Bob Givens, inker and painter Martha Sigall, artist Richard Kent Jones (Chuck’s brother) and voice actors June Foray and Stan Freberg.

“One thing that makes me very happy about this picture is that people like Maurice Noble and Martha Sigall and Bob Givens, who didn’t get a voice in the past, got to have a voice,” says Selby.

To deconstruct many of Jones’ cartoon masterpieces, including 1952’s “Feed the Kitty,” which features arguably the most brilliantly rendered animated performance ever put on film from an emotional bulldog named Marc Antony, 1957’s “What’s Opera, Doc?,” a stunningly designed and directed Looney Tunes version of Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelungen,” 1965’s minimalist “The Dot and the Line,” which won Jones his second Oscar, and 1966’s “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which has become as much a holiday staple as eggnog, the film juxtaposes finished cartoon clips with Jones’ original pencil drawings. Not only does that serve to illustrate how the director indelibly put his personal stamp on every one of his films, but it also offered Selby a potent way of presenting the clips.

“The cartoons are so incredibly rich; what do you put next to them that won’t pale?” she asks. “I had to try and find a way to use the cartoons so that you saw a clip you loved framed in a new way. When you see the artistry of those drawings, the movement and expression in still frame, I really hope that people will start thinking of animation as the fine art that it is.” Editors Steven Wecshler and Rachel Hepler also deserve credit for painstakingly finding the exact frame in each cartoon that corresponds to the pencil drawings, making the juxtapositions effective.

Capping the story of a career that is filled with a wealth of artistic highs and remarkably few lows proved to be difficult. “The hardest part of the whole picture was figuring out how we end it,” Selby says. “ ‘One Froggy Evening’ hadn’t found itself into the rest of the show yet, so it all just happened.”

If Chuck Jones is, as “Great Performances” executives put it, the “Michelangelo of cartoons,” then 1955’s “One Froggy Evening” is his Pieta. While Jones cites no favorites among his cartoons, claiming such an admission “would be like saying one of your children is your favorite,” this cartoon has earned his respect as the most difficult he ever made.

“[‘One Froggy Evening’] caused me a lot of trouble because the story was not a simple story,” says Jones, who lives in Corona del Mar and still goes to his studio in Irvine to sketch. “It was a complicated story and it took a helluva lot of sweat and tears.”

On the surface the cartoon is a shaggy-dog story about a singing, dancing, vaudeville-style amphibian named Michigan J. Frog (this was decades before Michigan’s second career as spokesman for the WB Network) who performs brilliantly, but only for his present owner. He is, in Jones’ words, “a child prodigy that wouldn’t prodig.” But “One Froggy Evening” also manages to plumb the mysteries of greed, human nature and fate, all in six minutes and, except for the songs, does so completely in pantomime. Spielberg in the documentary refers to it as “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of animated shorts.”

It also may be the purest work of a comedic genius who possesses the hand of an artist, the voice of an intellectual and the soul of a philosopher. *

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The “Great Performances” documentary “Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, A Life in Animation” can be seen Wednesday at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.