Chuck Reducks

His 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.

In 1936 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.

In his glory years (1946-57), Jones directed about 100 cartoons, seven-minute mini-masterpieces of character shading and comic subtlety. Along with scriptwriter Michael Maltese, he created the bon-vivant skunk Pepe Le Pew, the beep-beep Road Runner and his perennially flummoxed pursuer Wile E. Coyote. They devised brilliant one-offs such as One Froggy Evening, a lovely parable of exploitation (whose singing star, Michigan J. Frog, later became the character logo for the WB network), and the sublime Feed the Kitty, about a bulldog’s desperate attempts to protect a kitten prone to domestic disaster. Put that on your short list of cartoons to cherish.

Yet the great achievement of Jones and Maltese (and composer Carl Stalling and versatile vocalist Mel Blanc) was their development of the Warners’ stock company. Porky Pig was the harassed middle-management type, Elmer Fudd the chronic, choleric dupe. Bugs Bunny (introduced by director Tex Avery in 1940’s A Wild Hare) became the cartoon Cagney–urban, crafty, pugnacious–and then the blase underhare who wins every battle without ever mussing his aplomb; one raised eyebrow was enough to semaphore his superiority to the carnage around him.

And Daffy Duck–ah, Daffy! Here was modern man (well, modern mallard) in all his epic scheming and human frustration. He would debate with Bugs on the time of year (“Rabbit season!” “Duck season!”) before a shooting accident would require reconstructive plastic surgery. In the immortal Duck Amuck, Daffy valiantly attempts to keep the action on track while the hand of a conniving artist readjusts reality. Jones later said Bugs was the person he wished he could be and Daffy was the person he probably was.

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.

Yet Jones, a tall, genial charmer who sported the goatee and floppy bow tie of a small-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 art.

If influence is measured in the intelligent pleasure given to a huge audience over more than a half-century, then Jones was the Einstein of modern comedy. After all, just one little letter separates the cosmic from the comic. And Chuck Jones’ cartoons proved that those two words, those two worlds, could be one.

–By Richard Corliss