Word: cartoon
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...name-Charles M. Jones, when a producer wanted him to sound classy, or Chuck Jones, as he now prefers to bill himself-is scarcely known outside the movie business. Jones has spent his nearly 40-year career in the ebullient but usually anonymous medium of the animated cartoon...
...pretensions of grand opera (What's Opera, Doc?, Rabbit of Seville), made black comedy out of nuclear warfare a decade before Dr. Strangelove (Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century), played with the mechanics of film making (Duck Amuck, which might be called the Persona of animated cartoons), and lampooned every movie genre from cops to swashbucklers. His One Froggy Evening, starring a mysterious singing frog called Michigan J., is a morality play in cameo that comes as close as any cartoon ever has to perfection...
...attested by The Hollywood Cartoon, a current retrospective series at the New York Cultural Center, Jones' body of work is uniquely rich, subtle and inventive. His cartoons compare favorably in their vividness and variety with the best work from the Disney Studios. Perhaps they are not as innovative, but they are funnier, madder, certainly more deeply and consistently personal...
Directing a cartoon, like directing a full-length movie, requires total immersion in every aspect of the creation. Jones worked on the story with the writer, made all the important drawings himself, supervised the background painting, even collaborated on the sound effects and music. He habitually speaks of his characters as if they were people ("The Coyote fulfills Santayana's definition of a fanatic-someone who redoubles his efforts when he's forgotten his aim"). Moreover, he thinks of them as people who make ideal actors: they can achieve any facial expression or gesture the director desires, thus...
This is part of the reason why Warner Bros, remains deaf to Jones' urgings that it resume cartoon production. Indeed, Warner's has burned its original cartoon art to make storage space and has sold off the TV rights to the characters at a cheap rate. Jones, at 61 a gentle, whimsical figure with a Carl Sandburg forelock, is far from hard up. Father of a daughter, grandfather of three, he shuttles between his Hollywood offices and a home in the Burbank hills and weekends at a house overlooking the Pacific, which he shares with Dorothy, his wife...