![]() To say it was a simpler time misses the point: The great Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons of Hollywood's golden age were too hip for some producers at the time. were constrained to find humor in things that weren't bodily or sexually referenced." "They went out with gentle little pictures like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.… The reason they weren't scatological or had a lot of adult humor was because of censorship. "They weren't made for children," she says. (It was the center, in conjunction with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that curated the original show, before collaborating with the Smithsonian and the Museum of the Moving Image.) She bemoans the fact that her father's cartoons cannot be seen on television today (they were a staple of Saturday morning programming for decades) and that the powers that be don't see their adult appeal. Today Clough is a director of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity in Costa Mesa, California. "A wild wild hare was not for me what I needed was a character with the spicy, somewhat erudite introspection of Professor Higgins, who when nettled or threatened, would respond with the swagger of D'Artagnan as played by Errol Flynn, with the articulate quick-wittedness of Dorothy Parker-in other words, the Rabbit of My Dreams." "I could not animate a character I could laugh at but could not understand," he wrote. Jones, who died in 2002 at the age of 89, said he had to make the rabbit his own. Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones had a lot to do with standing him upright-as Chuck used to say, 'He stands on his back legs 'cause he's not afraid anymore.'" He was always ready to run, crouched down and scared. "In the early pictures he was a very different character," recalls Clough, "more like Woody Woodpecker. It was Bugs Bunny who changed the most under Jones and company. They were, rather, "inept contenders with the problem of life." "Most of our characters are not noted for triumph," he wrote. characters they created and developed: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd.… There, working beside animators and writers such as Friz Freleng and Mike Maltese, the young Jones learned a respect for the logic of a story and the importance of timing as they honed the Warner Bros. (Actually, they're battery-powered, but "RocketSkates" sounds better.) Their creator, Peter Treadway of ACTON, Inc., told me had originally wanted to name his company Acme, in homage to the company in the cartoons.Ĭhuck Jones Center for Creativity/Museum of the Moving ImageĬhuck Jones trained as a fine artist at what is now the California Institute of the Arts and began working as an animator at Warner in the 1930s under the legendary director Tex Avery. I had just come back from a Wearable Technologies Conference where I met a guy hawking RocketSkates-just the kind of thing the Coyote employed when trying to catch the Road Runner in the painted desert. We are talking about Clough's father as a major retrospective of his work, What's Up, Doc? The Animation of Chuck Jones, opens at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York before moving on to multiple cities in the U.S. It seems to me that the reason the cartoon's so enduring and strikes so many people: that feeling of 'I've got to have this thing! And I really can't justify why I need this so much, but I do.'" Obviously there are many other things that he could eat, and yet he cannot give up the idea of this one thing. "That's the Coyote to a T he is an obsessive-compulsive. "Chuck found a Santayana quote you may have seen: 'A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he's forgotten his aim,'" says Jones's daughter, Linda Jones Clough. The look of the cartoons is timeless, and so, it seems, is their appeal. cartoons that began in 1948 and petered out in the 1960s, after Jones had stopped directing them. Coyote, who wants beyond all reason to consume the Road Runner and attempted to do so in a series of Warner Bros. It was that irrational, almost mythical beast that inspired Jones's signature character, Wile E. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless.…" "The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want," wrote Twain. "I first became interested in the coyote while devouring Mark Twain's Roughing It at the age of 7," the animator recalled in his autobiography, Chuck Amuck. Not the wolf-like creature ( canus latrans) that has roamed the wilds of North America for millions of years and is now sometimes spotted in urban environments as diverse as Chicago and San Francisco, but the coyote-as-symbol that Chuck Jones crashed into as a child.
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