If you don’t know the name Chuck Jones, you almost certainly know his work. Chuck Jones has become the most famous of the directors who worked on the classic Looney Tunes shorts. The hands-off approach taken by Warner Bros. toward their cartoons let all of their directors retain a greater degree of creative control and individualism than at rival studios, and Jones was arguably the most distinctive of his group. If you know what to look for, his visual fingerprints are the most easily identified, and underwent the most apparent evolution over the course of his career. That career covered more than his long service as a director for Warners. Beginning as an animator, working his way up to director, storyman, and head of his own production company, Jones worked for Disney, Ub Iwerks, MGM, TV networks, and himself before his death in 2002.

If auteur theory can apply to any director working in mainstream theatrical animated shorts, Jones is that director. His films, and the attitudes and philosophy of filmmaking he held to, are still a fine source of inspiration, technique, and warning for aspiring filmmakers and animators. And on this, his 109th birthday, it’s worth going through a few of them.

Sniffles and the Bookworm (everyone has to start somewhere)

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Chuck Jones began his career with the Looney Tunes as an assistant animator in 1933. He was directing his own unit by 1938. In the intervening five years, the Looney Tunes were well on their way to their signature style. Walt Disney experimented with personality, believability, and production value, and the popularity of his work spawned legions of imitators. The Looney Tunes started out as one of them, but largely due to the influence of director Tex Avery, they became – well, looney. Fast-paced, irreverent, chasing a laugh at all costs, and in thrall to the limitless possibilities of animation: that’s what Avery brought to the series.

Jones admired Avery greatly, and even worked for him as an animator until Avery left Warner Bros. But when Jones began directing, his first shorts went back to the Disney model. That influence is most evident in the production value: the backgrounds of these early cartoons are richly painted, and shadows on the characters provide dimensionality. Jones also had an interest in stories about the little guy – literally. His first cartoon, "The Night Watchman" (1938), starred a young cat smaller than the mice who invaded his kitchen. And his first contribution to the Looney Tunes’ cast of recurring cartoon stars was also small: Sniffles the mouse. Big-eyed, naïve, and squeaky-voiced, Sniffles is cute before all else, and most of his 12 cartoons concern his awed wanderings through an oversized world. "Sniffles and the Bookworm" (1939) introduced his occasional sidekick, a bespectacled mute bookworm who plays the coward to Sniffles’s adventurer.

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It's hard to deny the sweetness of Sniffles, even when he starts to become cloying, and his cartoons are handsomely made. "Sniffles and the Bookworm" has some nice character interaction between the two title characters, though it often takes a backseat to gags built around the then-popular premise of storybook characters coming to life. But if you didn’t know that Sniffles was one of the Looney Tunes, you might not ever guess so. Almost nothing about his films, in look or tone, belongs in the same club as Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck. For all the apparent influence of Disney on the series, the Sniffles cartoons are also more saccharine than most of what the Disney studio was doing at the time; Mickey Mouse was never as insistently sweet as Sniffles. Walt also encouraged Disney artists to experiment with a range of subjects, tones, and characters, while Sniffles cartoons played the same note again and again (he was briefly reinvented as an obnoxious chatterbox in the early 1940s, but his career was all but over by then).

The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall (don’t be afraid to take risks)

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There’s a misconception about Jones’s work at Warners that he was only laboring on cutesy Sniffles cartoons before he learned to be funny with "The Dover Boys" (1942). At the same time Jones was working with Sniffles, he also made films like "Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur" (1939) and "Elmer’s Pet Rabbit" (1941). If these early Daffy and Bugs cartoons don’t display the personalized characterizations that Jones would give the characters in later years, they do comfortably fit in with the other early films featuring the future cartoon superstars.

But "The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall" did represent a major step forward for Jones as a director, and a major risk. Putting a title like that on any film is a bold statement in itself. A one-shot cartoon that doesn’t feature a recurring star character also faces longer odds at success, particularly if it looks weird to boot. The Looney Tunes were never as lavishly animated as Disney’s shorts, but they followed traditional schools of design for characters and backgrounds. "The Dover Boys" anticipates the Modernist trends in animation that studios like UPA would embrace later in the 40s with minimal backgrounds and more graphic, geometric construction of characters. That design sensibility suggested a different sort of movement to Jones (who called "The Dover Boys" “probably my only overt experiment”). Instead of fully animating the characters, Jones often resorted to smears of drybrush color to suggest rapid movement, or had characters abruptly shift from one still pose to another. All this helps to make "The Dover Boys" one of the fastest-paced Looney Tunes, loaded up with ridiculous gags that zip by one after the other.

None of this was standard practice in 1942, and Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger was not happy with the finished film. According to Jones, Schlesinger and the Warners executives were prepared to fire him over "The Dover Boys" if Word War II hadn’t made replacement labor hard to find. The film wasn’t terribly well-received in its initial release either. But Jones’s gamble paid off in the long run. The founders of UPA would later cite "The Dover Boys" as an inspiration. The Dover Boys themselves would resurface decades later to serenade Slappy Squirrel in Animaniacs. And as one of the few Warner Bros. theatrical shorts to slip into the public domain, "The Dover Boys" has circulated far and wide, picking up Internet meme status and an ambitious fan reanimation project. It just goes to show you can never know which risks will work out, so never be afraid to take a few.

Fast and Furry-ous (be specific when creating new material)

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After World War II, the style of humor in the Looney Tunes began to shift. The rapid-fire, a-gag-a-second sensibility that stressed all the impossible things animation could pull off gave way to more subtle humor driven by details, timing, and the personalities of the characters. Chuck Jones wasn’t the only artist at Warners who pushed things in that direction, but he embraced it and thrived with it. And as the Looney Tunes’ star characters evolved – and as Jones’s personal interpretations of them solidified – he became more specific on what the characters could and couldn’t do in his films. Bugs Bunny, for instance, moved from an all-occasions smart aleck to a trickster hero, with Jones’s mantra being “Bugs must always be provoked.” Otherwise, the quick-witted hare who could best nearly any opponent might come off as a bully.

That sort of specificity didn’t only apply to existing characters. When Jones created his own cartoon stars, he set down rules for himself to follow. "Fast and Furry-ous" (1949) was the first appearance of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, characters created by Jones and his chief storyman Michael Maltese. Originally intended as a send-up of predator/prey conflicts in other cartoons, the film spawned a series of 26 shorts directed or co-directed by Jones between 1949 and 1965, to say nothing of its continuing popularity to this day. The series offers a great opportunity to study Jones’s evolving art style, and that of his layout artist and sometime co-director Maurice Noble. But Jones didn’t start with just any coyote. Wile E. is based on the description of the coyote given by Jones’s favorite author Mark Twain: “a long, sick and sorry-looking skeleton with a grey wolf skin stretched over it…he is a living, breathing allegory of Want.” Jones also claimed, after his tenure at Warner Bros. was over, that he had a set of rules to follow on all the Coyote/Road Runner pictures, including that the Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep,” and that the Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.

Speaking to animation historian Michael Barrier for the book Hollywood Cartoons, Maltese claimed never to have heard of any rules for the series. He alleged that they were invented after the fact, “post production observations.” Some of them certainly weren’t followed all the time; the Road Runner leaves the road frequently throughout the series, and Wile E. did not rely on the Acme Corporation exclusively for his gadgets. Jones had a reputation as the intellectual among the Warner Bros. directors, and at times seemed sensitive to maintain that reputation; creating a post hoc ruleset may have been to that end.

Rabbit of Seville (borrow from the best)

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I know I can’t be the only person who was introduced to classical music through cartoons as a kid. Cartoon shorts like the Looney Tunes were also easy to come by on TV in those days, and they knew how to use classical music for comedic ends like no one’s business. As the old saying goes, steal from the best.

Chuck Jones didn’t tap that well as often as some of his peers; director Friz Freleng, not without talent in music himself, loved to work with musical timing in his films. But Jones did his share of cartoons centered around classical music. The most famous of them is probably "What’s Opera, Doc?" (1957). Jones allegedly felt it was his best film, and even judged his friends by their response to it. "What’s Opera, Doc?" looks amazing, and it is a fine short, but it’s also among the most basic Bugs vs. Elmer conflicts in their filmography: Elmer’s hunting rabbits, Bugs fools him with drag, and Elmer gets mad (albeit to operatic proportions). The fact that they’re in an opera is the film’s one innovation – a big one, to be sure, but it is a single gag nevertheless.

Duck Amuck (lead with character)

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The Looney Tunes became more character-driven with time, and Jones’s take on those characters settled into very specific conceptions. His vision for Bugs Bunny developed over time and was broadly shared by fellow directors Freleng and Robert McKimson; they each had their own idiosyncrasies in their Bugs pictures, but they all stuck to the idea that he shouldn’t be a bully, and should be a comic hero firing back at the fools who provoke him. Jones’s take on Daffy Duck, on the other hand, changed relatively quickly, and represented a sharp break from what came before. Starting life as the ultimate screwball cartoon character, a nutsy looney toon who hooted and lisped his way through his encounters with hapless, tormented straight men, Daffy in Jones’s hands became the ultimate id. A greedy, selfish, conniving duck, set upon by endless bad luck and his own impatience and obsessions, Jones’s Daffy had a reach forever exceeding his grasp as he desperately strove for riches and glory.

While Jones’s conception of Daffy may not have lived up to his name all the time, he was a more rounded and complicated character than the earlier, wacky Daffy had been. This made him the ideal candidate for the exercise Jones undertook with "Duck Amuck" (1953), one of the most famous of all the Looney Tunes shorts. Daffy’s battle with a mischievous off-screen animator is loaded with fantastic visual gags, but what carries the picture is Daffy’s outrage, his desperation, and his personality. And that was by design. “Who is Daffy Duck anyway?” Jones wrote about his intentions with the film. “Would you recognize him if I did this to him? …What if he had no voice? No face? What if he wasn’t even a duck anymore?” Bugs Bunny’s appearance as the animator at the end served as a final joke, but for Jones, the hand tormenting Daffy throughout the film was his own.

Go Fly a Kit (revisit old themes with more mature skills)

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There’s certainly a perception among Chuck Jones’s critics that his work began slipping as early as the mid-1950s. Among the accusations is a charge that Jones regressed back into his old weakness for sweetness. That may be true of Jones’s output by the 1970s. Still, I rather like many of the Looney Tunes shorts Jones directed in the late 50s and 1960s. There is a definite shift from Jones’s work earlier in the 50s to a slower pace and less splashy visual activity, but that’s hardly an inherent negative. And I just don’t think it’s fair or true to say that he fell back into his cutesy tendencies from the beginning of his career. For proof against that charge, one need only to watch "Go Fly a Kit" (1957), a one-off cartoon about a flying cat and his girlfriend. It is a cute film, more charming than funny, and a return to Jones’s interest in little characters in a big world. But it’s hardly a throwback to the old Sniffles films. For one thing, Jones’s drawing style shows almost 20 years’ worth of evolution from those early cartoons. The characters in "Go Fly a Kit" are more stylized, featuring the curved mouth lines, scruffy hair tufts, and readable, quick-changing expressions typical of Jones’s later work. There’s an evident confidence in the storytelling too; the plot moves along at a brisk pace instead of waiting for the wide-eyed innocence of its characters to react to something, a la Sniffles. And while the film doesn’t lead with humor, it is funnier than Sniffles ever was, with an extended duel between the flying cat and a vicious bulldog.

Louvre Come Back to Me! (make the most of lean budgets)

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With the theatrical shorts market in its death throes by the 1960s, the budgets for the Looney Tunes took a heavy cut. This wasn’t only a problem at Warner Bros.; animation has always been expensive, and costs were such by the 1960s that even Disney was enforcing economies. Limited animation, popularized earlier by UPA, became ever more common at this time, with studios like Hanna-Barbara enjoying success on television. At Warner Bros., limited animation may not have taken over, but the loss of funds (and a diminishing talent pool) took their toll on the production value of the Looney Tunes.

Jones may just have had good luck that he was partnered with Maurice Noble and the rest of their unit. But a cartoon like "Louvre Come Back to Me!" (1962) shows more than luck at making the most of limited resources. Jones and Noble didn’t let slashed budgets take away from design. Taking advantage of the cartoon’s setting in the Louvre, they created a stylized take on the museum and its contents, and some lovely graphic depictions of the streets of Paris for the cartoon’s opening. Backgrounds and layouts may not invoke belly laughs on a first watch, but they do catch the eye right away, and there are fun details done with the museum’s contents to look for on repeat viewings. Bigger, more immediate laughs come at the beginning of the cartoon – the last in the Pepé Le Pew series – when Pepé’s stroll through Paris disrupts various pairs of lovers. Flowers, birds, an old and a young human couple, and (of course) cats move from one simple, readable pose of amour to an equally simple but strongly contrasting pose of shock at the stench of skunk.

The evolution of Jones’s drawing style continued into the 60s. This matters to his films more than, say, Freleng’s, because Jones was responsible for many key layout poses for his characters. Comparing "Louvre Come Back to Me!" to earlier Pepé cartoons, the characters have all become longer and lankier, their fur scruffier, their lines more evident (if not quite as sketchy as they would become in Jones’s final works) and their expressions more stylized and exaggerated. These extreme face shapes let the characters get over a lot of emotion without much movement. A great example is when the jealous cat boyfriend, his breath held and his nose clamped, tries to confront Pepé. While the skunk salutes his rival and launches a rambling monologue about a potential duel, the cat keeps to a small number of poses, shifting between cuts, that sell his desperation for air until he pops like a balloon and crashes back into a suit of armor.

Gay Purr-ee (be careful of the business end of show biz)

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All the entries on this list so far have come from Jones’s time at Warner Bros. While he did work elsewhere, Warners was where most of the notable work of his career happened. Jones had a contentious relationship with his employers. He disliked his first boss, Leon Schlesinger, and clashed frequently with successor producer Eddie Seltzer. For their part, Warners rarely acknowledged their cartoon division as being anywhere on par with live action filmmaking, often seeming more interested in the merchandising potential of the films than their production or quality. And yet they exercised exclusivity agreements with their cartoon directors, which spelled trouble for Jones when Warners picked up the distribution rights to a 1962 animated musical called Gay Purr-ee.

Gay Purr-ee was the second (and ultimately last) feature film by limited animation pioneers UPA. A turn-of-the-century musical featuring the voices of Judy Garland and Robert Goulet, it was an opportunity for the studio to showcase its heavily designed sensibility in a feature. Its tale of feline romance complicated by entrapment and grooming, set against the sophisticated backdrop of 1895 Paris, make it more appropriate for adult audiences than children, and a sequence where Garland’s character Mewsette is interpreted by all the great artists who passed through Paris in the film’s time period make it a treat for art lovers. It wasn’t a Chuck Jones picture – the director was Abe Levitow, a former animator for Jones who occasionally directed shorts produced by his unit. But the story for the film was written by Jones and his wife Dorothy.

Jones may not have directed the picture, but working on it at all was evidently a violation of his exclusivity agreement with Warner Bros. Motion pictures have always been among the most complicated marriages between art and commerce, and creative figures disregard the realities of the business end of show biz at their peril. Gay Purr-ee has attracted enthusiastic reviews over the years, but it didn’t do well at the box office, and Warners fired Jones and laid off his entire unit over the breach of contract.

The Unshrinkable Jerry Mouse (not everything will work out)

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After getting the boot from Warner Bros., Jones recruited most of his old unit to take over Sib Tower 12 Productions with producer Les Goldman. Almost immediately, they were offered a contract by MGM, the “Tiffany’s of film studios.” MGM had shuttered their own animation studio in the late 1950s, planning to coast on their backlog of shorts, but had second thoughts by the 60s. With their original creative team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbara off on their own, MGM turned to Jones to revive their shorts program, purchasing Sib Tower 12 and installing Jones as its head. And an animation deal with MGM meant working with Tom and Jerry, the studio’s biggest cartoon stars.

With people like Noble and Levitow still at his side, Jones’s films for MGM all look great, on par with anything they did for Warners or what Hanna and Barbara did in the 1940s. But Tom and Jerry were the sort of “chase” scenario that Jones set out to mock with the Coyote/Road Runner series. Doing the real thing proved a challenge. While no stranger to cartoon violence, Jones found the particular brand of mayhem practiced by Tom and Jerry unsettling. For a director who was so tuned into character personalities, he also couldn’t understand or relate to Tom and Jerry the way Hannah and Barbara had. “[I] just kind of changed the characters to my own way of thinking,” Jones later admitted. Tom became more of a sourpuss in Jones’s hands, acquiring harsh black eyebrows and a pot belly. Jerry had always been cute, but his design was pushed even further in that direction, while his personality seemed to shift depending on the plot of a given cartoon.

"The Unshrinkable Jerry Mouse" (1964), a relatively early entry in Jones’s tenure at MGM, is close to the standard conflict in earlier Tom and Jerry cartoons: it’s set around a house where Tom is the housecat and Jerry the hole-dwelling mouse, their conflict comes in deciding the fate of a new kitten, and cartoon violence abounds. But as familiar as it seems, it’s not of the same school as the older shorts. Tom is much nastier than he tended to be before, and Jerry more assertive. Later cartoons by Sib Tower 12 would throw the pair into the far future on another planet, or cast them as secret agents, or turn them loose in surrealist construction sites. Jerry might be cute and sweet, or taunting, or deadpan tough, while Tom never garnered the sympathy he had in the Hanna-Barbara days.

The results were uneven, the reaction was mixed, and Jones himself conceded that the effort hadn’t worked out as hoped. When asked about the experience in 1972, he told his interviewers: “I said to hell with [Tom and Jerry].”

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (you can do a faithful adaptation while putting your own stamp on the material)

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Jones didn’t seem to have much luck in working with characters he had no hand in creating or developing. Tom and Jerry didn’t work out. Walt Kelly despised what Jones did with Pogo. Author Norman Juster hated Jones’s adaptation of his novel The Phantom Tollbooth, despite the film’s good reviews, and Jones’s adaptation of fellow Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin’s book The Bear That Wasn’t (1967) left Tashlin so upset that he never spoke to Jones again. But Jones did have at least one happy experience adapting another’s work, and it came from his old friend Dr. Seuss.

Seuss (real name Ted Geisel) and Jones had worked together on army training films at Warner Bros. during World War II, and Jones maintained an interest in adapting one of Geisel’s children’s books to animation. Geisel was reluctant; his experience as writer on the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T had been unpleasant; but in the end he and Jones agreed to produce a Christmas special for CBS out of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. While Geisel wrote the script himself, there were significant departures from the book made by Jones to extend it to a half-hour. The Grinch’s terrified recollections of Christmas and his theft of all the Whos’ decorations and presents were both lengthened, dog Max’s part was enlarged, and the climax was modified to include a literal cliffhanger. Jones brought changes to the story through the character design as well. It was the TV special, not the book, that established the Grinch as green, and Jones’s Grinch had a pot belly, dark fur collar, and forked hair tuft (and something of voice actor Boris Karloff in his profile). The Whos became furry-faced creatures, except for Cindy Lou-Who, an inexplicably antennaed adorable little girl.

These changes in story and style are not insignificant, and they’re the sorts of tinkering that got Jones into trouble with other authors. Such changes can distance an adaptation from the intentions of the original work, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable. But that didn’t happen with The Grinch. Since its initial airing in 1966, it’s not only been widely regarded as Jones’s best work post-Looney Tunes, but the most successful adaptation of Dr. Seuss. As Jones’s attempts show, it may be difficult to pull it off consistently, but you can do a faithful adaptation that carries your own unique touches and contributions.

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