Chuck Jones Interview (page: 2 / 5) Animation Pioneer	Print Interview

In your book you make it clear that Johnson provided a lesson for you about human nature.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Chuck Jones: You cannot take anything for granted. The fact that he was different than other cats. If you see a cat, you do not necessarily see all cats. He was not every cat, in other words, any more than any of us are really every man, or every woman. We do take that for granted, too. That laid the groundwork, so when I got to doing things like Daffy Duck, or Bugs Bunny, or Coyote -- that's not all coyotes, that is THE particular coyote. "Wile E. Coyote, Genius." That's what he calls himself, at any rate. He's different. He has an overweening ego, which isn't necessarily true of all coyotes.

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Were there books in your early years that influenced you?

Mark Twain's, Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age. He and his brother crossed the United States in a stagecoach, how romantic can you get? They went from Kansas City and Independence, Missouri and out across the Great Plains, with four horses, pulling them across the plains.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mark Twain went on to start telling the first time he met a coyote. And his expression -- when I was 6 years old I read this -- and he said that the coyote is so meager, and so thin, and so scrawny, and so unappetizing that, he said, "A flea would leave a coyote to get on a velocipede, (or a bicycle)." There's more food on a bicycle than there is on a coyote. And he said how the coyote always looked like he was kind of ashamed of himself. And no matter what the rest of his face was doing, his mouth was always looking kind of crawly. And there are some wonderful expressions about how the coyote exists in that terrible environment, but how fast it is. And he said, "If you ever want to teach a dog lessons about what an inferior subject it is, let him loose when there's a coyote out there."

Mark Twain's Roughing It. I've read it over and over again, and I recommend to anybody. You can still get it. It's two volumes. He goes on to when he lived in San Francisco and Silver City. It's great history, and charmingly told.

Do you remember when you first read it?

Chuck Jones: I was six, I think.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I started reading when I was about three, a little over three. My father felt it was best if we did our own reading. He said he had too many things he wanted to read himself to waste his time reading to us. He said, "You want to read? Learn to read." He said, "Hell, you learn to walk at two years. You can certainly learn to read at three." And so we all did. We all learned to read very early. And he helped us by seeing to it that we had plenty of things to read. In those days people moved a lot. And very often people left their whole libraries. You must understand -- anybody living today, or the day of television or radio and stuff -- that in those days there wasn't any such thing. Reading was what you did, that's how you found out things.

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That was the way you learned anything. In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War. Nobody had a radio. It wasn't until the 1920s people began to have that. Even a phonograph, or something like that, was pretty expensive. They were marvelous, but we didn't have one until the 1920s.

Although my childhood was stringent, we were hardly living in abject poverty at any time. But we were able to move to houses that were loaded with books. There were four children and two adults. We'd move into that house like a pack of locusts and go through all the books there. Then my father would go out and rent another one of what he called, a furnished house. It didn't matter whether there was any furniture in it, but it did matter if there were books in it.

How did your father feel about you becoming a cartoonist?

Chuck Jones: Actually, he was responsible for it, but he didn't know what I was going to do. When I went to high school I wasn't brighter than the other kids, I just read so damn much. I got good grades in things that I liked, but I didn't get along with the things that I didn't. Finally, when I was about to enter my junior year, my father took me out and put me in art school. He figured that I'd probably had enough general education, but I needed to learn how to do something, he didn't know what. There was a fine arts school there called the Chouinard Art Institute, which is now called the California Institute of the Arts. They have a fine animation division there now, probably the best in the world, which is a curious thing because, a lot of the young people that went to Chouinard Art Institute became the backbone of the animation business when it was new. He didn't lead me into cartoons, he led me into learning how to draw in a practical way and not just drawing anything you wanted to.

I would say my mother had more to do with my education as an artist, if you want to call me that, than anything else. All of us drew, and all of us went into different fields of graphics. My sister is a fine sculptress, and my other sister taught painting. My brother is still a very fine painter, and a photographer. All of us went into it. Why? Because we weren't afraid to go into it.

I gather that your parents were not critical of your art?

Chuck Jones: No.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My mother said -- and I didn't realize how well it works -- when I'd bring a drawing to her, she said, "I don't look at the drawing. I looked at the child, and if the child was excited, I got excited." And then we could discuss it. Because we were bringing something that meant something to me as a child. And so she would join in my lassitude, or my excitement, or my frustration. She wasn't a psychologist, but she did understand this simple matter. If always to back to...it accomplishes the only thing that has any meaning to a little child, the only thing an adult can give a child is time. That's all, there isn't anything else. If you give them time, that's what they need, and the only thing they need, really. If you give them time you'll have to be understanding.

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