Word: warner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cartoons, starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and a dozen other barnyard thespians, were the star attractions of countless children's Saturday afternoons--and internal lives. But Chuck Jones' Warner Bros. cartoons were more than kid stuff, as we realized long before their creator's death last week, at 89, of congestive heart failure. "We weren't making them for kids or for adults," he often said. "We were making them for ourselves." And, a grateful viewer has to say, for the best part of ourselves...
...Jones joined the cheerful gang of animator-anarchists at Termite Terrace, as the Warner Bros. cartoonists called their dilapidated digs. He directed his first short, The Night Watchman, in 1938. But it took a wartime assignment to bring out the comic fatalist in Jones. With Theodor (Dr. Seuss) Geisel, he hatched the Private Snafu shorts--irreverent sketches of an Army recruit whose laziness and general bad attitude forever threaten to hand victory to Hitler and Tojo. By war's end, Jones was infusing the brisk sauciness of these cartoons into his civilian work...
Kids knew this stuff was funny. Connoisseurs now know it was great. But to studio heads Jack and Harry Warner, the work of Chuck & Co. was just filler. Jones swore that the Warners believed his unit was making Mickey Mouse cartoons--"and when they found out we didn't, they shut it down." This was in 1962; after a quarter-century directing terrific, profitable, studio-defining films, Jones was earning all of $37,500 a year...
...town art teacher, had plenty of career left. He reunited with Geisel and directed two Dr. Seuss half-hours, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Horton Hears a Who! He wrote two delightful memoirs, Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks. And for a 1985 Museum of Modern Art tribute to Warner Bros. animation, he drew new Bugses and Daffys on the Manhattan museum's walls--a tacit acknowledgment from the world of high culture that this cartoon man was a significant creator of modern...
...Beland's drawing style enhances the light and happy tone. Rendered in black and white, his fat lines are all soft curves that form simple but recognizable caricatures. The expressive figures have an animated look that may remind you of Warner Brothers cartoons. The eyebrows float around the character's heads like caterpillars dangling from invisible threads. Beland also keeps the layouts nicely varied but always easy to read...