Chuck Jones

Charles Martin Jones was born in Spokane, Washington, and grew up mostly in California after his father's business ventures kept failing and the family kept moving. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, then took whatever animation work he could find during the Depression -- washing celluloid, inking backgrounds, filling in for absent artists -- before landing at Leon Schlesinger's studio in 1933 as an assistant animator. The studio made Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for Warner Bros., and Jones worked his way up through its ramshackle "Termite Terrace" unit alongside Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng. He was promoted to director in 1938, twenty-five years old, already arguing with his bosses about how violent a cartoon needed to be to work.

Over nearly three decades at Warner Bros., Jones directed several hundred shorts and shaped or refined Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Pepe Le Pew and Marvin the Martian. His most acclaimed shorts -- Duck Amuck (1953), One Froggy Evening (1955), What's Opera, Doc? (1957) -- pushed the format toward formal experiment rather than kids' filler. Warner Bros. fired him in 1962 after discovering he had moonlighted, in violation of his contract, on the UPA feature Gay Purr-ee. He moved to MGM and revived Tom and Jerry from 1963 to 1967, then ran his own studio, directing the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) and Horton Hears a Who! (1970) from Dr. Seuss's books, before returning to Warner Bros. in the 1970s.

The cartoons read as chaos, but Jones ran his unit like an engineer. He wrote out formal rules governing the Road Runner shorts -- gravity applies to the Coyote only after he notices he has run off a cliff, the Road Runner never harms the Coyote directly -- and treated slapstick as a discipline with laws, not an excuse for anarchy. That precision did not protect his ownership of the work: the characters most identified with him, drawn and refined over decades, belonged to Warner Bros., not to him, and he spent years after the 1962 firing negotiating for the right to use his own creations commercially. The firing itself, over a technicality Warner Bros. had tolerated in others, stung him for the rest of his life as a betrayal after twenty-nine years at the studio.

He died in 2002 at eighty-nine, by then reclassified from studio hand to acknowledged artist -- three of his shorts were inducted into the National Film Registry, and animation scholars had spent two decades treating What's Opera, Doc? and Duck Amuck as serious formal achievements rather than filler between features. Robin Williams, presenting his honorary Oscar in 1996, called him "the Orson Welles of animation." The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity in Costa Mesa, which he founded in 1999, continues showing and teaching his work. Warner Bros. still owns the characters he helped make famous, and his name now sells almost as reliably as theirs.

Chuck Jones's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Duck Amuck film
  Daffy Duck short later inducted into the National Film Registry 1953
• One Froggy Evening film
  The singing-frog short, National Film Registry 1955
• What's Opera, Doc? film
  Elmer Fudd/Bugs Bunny opera parody, National Film Registry 1957
• The Dot and the Line film
  Won the competitive Academy Award for Best Animated Short, 1966 1965
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas! television
  TV special adapted from Dr. Seuss, still broadcast annually 1966
• Chuck Jones Center for Creativity other
  Costa Mesa institution he founded to teach and preserve animation 1999

• 1933 aged ~21 Joins Leon Schlesinger's studio as an assistant animator
• 1938 aged ~26 Promoted to director at twenty-five
• 1949 aged ~37 Introduces Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in Fast and Furry-ous
• 1957 aged ~45 Directs What's Opera, Doc?
• 1962 aged ~50 Fired by Warner Bros. for violating his exclusive contract on Gay Purr-ee
• 1966 aged ~54 Directs How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and wins the Oscar for The Dot and the Line
• 1996 aged ~84 Receives an Honorary Academy Award, presented by Robin Williams
• February 22, 2002 aged 89 Dies at home in Corona del Mar, California, at 89

• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. rival studio founder
• Jim Henson 1936–1990
  Creator of the Muppets and a central figure in Sesame Street and family television. influenced
• Dr. Seuss 1904–1991
  Author and illustrator whose rhythmic books transformed American children’s reading and publishing. adapted the work of
• Charles M. Schulz 1922–2000
  Cartoonist who drew Peanuts for fifty years and made Charlie Brown a national figure. contemporary American cartoonist