Interview: Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer

We've been asking people that we interview "What person inspired you the most?" But in your case, I believe there was a cat.

Chuck Jones: Well, there was a cat by the unlikely name of Johnson, the only cat I've ever known who had a last name for a first name. I don't know whether it was his first name or last name. We were living in Newport Beach, California in a house. This was around 1918, I was 6 years old. My brother and I saw this cat came to visit us, or take up residence, rather as cats do. It was early in the morning and he came strolling over the sand dunes. He was a cat that walked like a prize-fighter. He had scar tissue on his chest, and one ear was slightly bent. He had a piece of string tied around his neck, an old wooden tongue depressor, and in crude lettering, in lavender ink, it said, "Johnson." We didn't know whether that was his blood type, or his name, or his former owner's name, or anything, so we called him Johnson. He answered to that as well as anything else. Like most cats he doesn't answer to anything. He answered to food, that's what he answered to.

This story established once and for all in my mind that every cat is different than other cats. Our ex-President, Ronald Reagan said, "If you've seen one Redwood tree, you've seen them all." A lot of people, I do believe, that don't have the knowledge of cats, tend to think that all cats are pretty much the same. Like, they say 'meow.' Of course they don't say 'meow.'

He came to live with us, and he turned out to be a rather spectacularly different cat. The first morning when we had breakfast, he came in and he spoke. The word he spoke was later identified in James Joyce's, Ulysses and the cat came in to Stephen Dedalus. He came in and spelled what he said, M-G-K-N-A-O-W. You can't pronounce it any other way. I never met a cat yet, that if he wants something, he'll come up and say, "mgknaow." That's what old Johnson did.

He came up to my mother while she was finishing breakfast and she figured he wanted something to eat. So she offered him a piece of bacon, and piece of egg white, and a piece of toast, all of which he spurned. He obviously had nothing like that in mind. Finally, in a little spurt of whimsy, which was typical of my mother, she gave him a half a grapefruit, and it electrified him. It was like he had taken a hypodermic. Suddenly, there was this flash of tortoise shell cat whirling around with this thing. Then he came sliding out of it and the thing slowly came to a stop. The whole thing was completely cleaned out and we looked at him in astonishment. He loved grapefruit more than anything else in the whole world. That lead to the four kids who lived in that place, my brother and two sisters, we realized we had something there that we could really enjoy. So each morning for a while we gave him half a grapefruit, and that was nothing to him. Then, we decided we'd have some fun with him, so we gave him a whole grapefruit, big ones. It was like a man trying to bite a watermelon. It was so big, he couldn't get a grip on it. He became sort of a basketball player, he'd dribble this thing all over the room trying to find some place that he could nail it down. Finally he'd get it into a corner then he'd take one of his sharp, eye teeth and he'd rip it. But, he couldn't do it while it was moving, so he was dribbling it all over the house. Once he got that, then he went to work. He'd eat it until all the inside was gone. Sometimes he'd eat it in such a way that he ended up wearing a little space helmet, which is really the whole grapefruit, with a flap hanging down on one side like a batter's helmet. He was quite a cat. But when he had it on, he seemed to like it. And that was long before anybody had ever head of space helmets. Sometimes he'd walk out on the beach with this thing on his head, until it really bothered him, then he'd kick it off.

He liked to be with people, particularly young people. He was very fond of children. We'd all learned to swim early and one day we were swimming and we looked around and here was Johnson out there swimming with us. When we went swimming in those simple days, women wore complete outfits that came below their knee. Ours were like mini-blouses, came over your shoulder and came down to here.

One day we were swimming and we looked around and here was Johnson out there swimming with us. I don't know if you've ever seen a cat swim or not. They can swim very well, but most of them don't seem to like it. He really did, but only his eyes would show above the water. He looked like a pug-nosed alligator with hair. For some reason they grimace like this, and his teeth were hanging down, and most of him was under water, all the oil comes off the fur and trails behind them, along with a few sea gull feathers and other stuff. When he got tired out there, he would come and put his arms up on our shoulders and sort of hang there for a while. It was all right as long as it was only people in the family. But unfortunately, it wasn't always, because if he couldn't find one of us, he'd approach a stranger. People would come out of the surf looking pretty disturbed, and you knew they'd had a social encounter with old Johnson. They always looked pretty disturbed. So here's a cat that eats grapefruit and swims in the ocean. He was a very, very splendid cat because you couldn't ignore him, you couldn't take anything for granted about him like you can with many cats and all dogs. You know what a dog's 'gonna do because a dog's 'gonna do what you want him to do. As I say, all dogs are professionals. They do what's expected of them. As Mark Twain said about them, if you'll tell me what opinions a dog has, I'll tell you where he gets his bones. Those were his opinions.

At any rate, the great moment for Johnson came one time when he had eaten his grapefruit and it was stuck on his head, and he came out and strolled down the beach. We were up on the porch of our house, a two-story house, looking down at the sand. And he started off toward the pier, and as it happened the Young Women's Christian Association were having a picnic there. Well, not only did he have his helmet on, but somewhere along the line he had found parts of a dead sea gull and it had left a few feathers on his shoulders. So he was quite a sight. He strolled down to where these girls were having a picnic. And they took one look at this thing with the feathers, and the whole business, so they screamed, and jumped up and ran into the ocean. Well, that was a technical mistake, because of course, Johnson, being a gregarious sort, decided that he wanted to join the group, I don't know, maybe he was going to appeal to the Supreme Court that male cats weren't allowed in the Girl Scouts, or whatever it was. So he went in after them and they left in various states of undress -- not undress, I mean their minds were boggled. And I never saw so many girls that were so boggled. And they never came back to Balboa, or Newport Beach.

It was important to me, because it established once and for all in my mind that every cat is different than other cats.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who gave you your first break in the field of cartoons?

Chuck Jones: I came out of art school in 1931, right in the worst of the Depression, two years before Franklin Roosevelt came in. The whole United States was flat. To expect to get a job when three out of every ten people were unemployed was ridiculous, particularly for a kid without any experience in anything. I had worked my way through art school by being a janitor, but I never worked full time as a janitor, and I wasn't sure I was capable. I was certainly willing.

When I came out, one of my friends who had been at Chouinard with me had gone to work with Walt Disney's ex-partner, a man by the name of Ub Iwerks. He was the one who animated most of the Disney stuff. Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer. Iwerks was a great artist and a great animator. Somebody convinced him that he was the brains and the talent in the outfit, so he left and started his own studio,

He was hiring people and he hired this friend of mine named, Fred Kopietz. Fred called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to work, to my extreme astonishment, which has held for 63 years.

I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do. And to this day, that's been the astonishment of my life, and delight of my life, and the wonder of my life, and the puzzlement that anybody would be so stupid as to be willing to do that. I hear all these success stories of people, these captains of industry, these forgers of the world, and empire builders and so on. And they talk about all the money they've made and become presidents and all that, and I thought, jeez, but look at me. When I was offered a chance to be head of studios I wouldn't take it. I like to work with the tools of my trade. The tools of my trade is a lot of paper and a pencil, and that's all it is.

Tell us what your first job was.

Chuck Jones: I started out as what they call a cell washer. The cells are the paintings that go into the camera in animated cartoons. The ink lines are on one side and the color is on the other. In those days these were black and white, but they were made the same way. In those days, those cells cost seven cents a piece. You used three or 4,000 drawings in those simple days in a seven or eight minute cartoon. So after you finished a picture, you washed them off and used them again.

One of those black and white Mickey Mouse cells recently sold at auction in New York for $175,000. They were washing them off, too. Nobody thought to save them. Why should they? They weren't worth anything. So that was my first job, washing them off. Then I moved up to become a painter in black and white, some color. Then I went on to take animator's drawings and traced them on to the celluloid. Then I became what they call an in-betweener, which is the guy that does the drawing between the drawings the animator makes.

You bounced around a good deal in the early years, from one place to another.

Chuck Jones: Yeah, for about a year. I worked for Charles Mintz Studio, and then I worked for Walt Lantz who later on did Woody Woodpecker.

Tell us about how you came to work for Leon Schlesinger and Warner Brothers, what that was like.

Chuck Jones: In 1933 I went to work for Leon Schlesinger and that's where I stayed for 38 years. Leon had formed a company called, Pacific Art and Title. To this day that company exists, it does a lot of the title work for various studios, and independent producers.

Unfortunately, he was very lazy. All he knew was, he made pictures that Warner Brothers bought. I think he was married to one of Warner's sisters, or something. There was a familial relationship of some kind there. He made pictures and sold them to Warner Brothers. And he didn't care, as long as they bought them, that was fine. Warner Brothers didn't care what they were, as long as we provided the product. You had to have a feature picture and you had to have two or three short subjects, which were aggregated into a two hour program. So you needed a bunch of short subjects.

Tell us a little bit about how Leon Schlesinger became one of the prime inspirations for Daffy Duck.

Chuck Jones: Well, Leon Schlesinger was very lazy, and that stood to our advantage, because he didn't hang over us or anything. He spent as little time in the studio as he could. He'd come back and ask us what we were working on, and we knew he wasn't going to listen, no matter what we said. So we would say something like, well, "I'm working on this picture with Daffy Duck, and it turns out that Daffy isn't a duck at all, he's a transvestite chicken." And he would say, "That'th it boyth. Put in lot'th of joketh." He had a little lisp. He'd say, "I'm off to the rathes." So he'd go charging out. If you don't know what a race is, it's a place where 'horthes' run. So, one day, when he went out, Tex was directing and I was animating at that time, Bob Clampet was animating, too. Cal Howard, one of our writers, said to Tex, "You know that voice of Leon's would make a good voice for Daffy Duck." So he called in Mel Blanc and said, "Can you do Leon Schlesinger's voice?" And Mel said, "Sure, it's very thimple." O.K. So they recorded the whole voices and everything. The one thing we forgot though before the picture was half way into work was that Leon was going to have to see that picture, and what's worse, he was going to hear it and hear his own voice coming out of that duck.

Did you think you'd be fired?

Chuck Jones: Oh, yes. I expected to be fired. In fact, we all wrote our resignations, all of us that worked on the film. We figured the director and the animators would be canned. We figured we'd resign before we got fired. Fortunately, we didn't send them in. Leon came crashing in that day, as he usually did, and we assembled all the troops to watch the picture. And, he came in and went running down the aisle, or plowing down the aisle like a plaid battleship and climbed up on this throne that he'd established at one end of this projection room. It was a gold throne that he'd sit on and every time he got up there'd be gold flakes sticking to his pants. We sat on old pews. Pews that he'd stolen from some Warner Bros. picture. Every time we got up we got up there was splinters in our bum. So we all got something out of the showing. Leon jumped up on his platform and in order to make us feel good he said, "Roll the garbage." That's what he always said. It made you feel like he really cared. So they rolled the garbage, and of course everyone in the studio knew the drama of the situation, so nobody laughed, of course. He didn't care, he didn't pay attention to what anybody else did anyway, or heard. It was only his opinion that counted. So at the end of the picture there was this deathly silence and you could hear crickets, or a horse neying like they do in westerns, and way off in the distance a dog would be wailing our death, but old Leon jumped up and looked around and glared around, and we thought, "Here comes the old ax." And he said, "Jesus Christ, that's a funny voice, where'd you get that voice?" So, that was what it was, and he went to his unjust desserts, doubtless taking his money with him, went to Nineveh and Tyre, but the voice lives on. As long as Daffy Duck is alive, Leon Schlesinger is there, in his corner of heaven.

You've said we laugh at ourselves when we laugh at Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, and that laughter can be therapeutic because it makes people feel less alone. Do you have a sense of doing that for people?

Chuck Jones: It's a marvelous thing when it happens. I've never gotten used to the idea that I can do anything that way. When people laugh, and they respond, it's a gift.

There's one rule that I feel is vital. It was set down by G.K. Chesterton, who said, "I don't take myself seriously, but I take my work deadly seriously." Comedy is a very, very, very stringent business. Jackie Gleason said it's probably the most difficult and demanding of any form of drama. Because you have an instant critic: laughter. If you don't get that laughter...it isn't tragedy. You don't know if people are suffering enough or not in tragedy, but in comedy you know. If you're making it for films, you don't know until you've taken it to an audience. I never had the courage to take any of mine to an audience. I would die. The first picture I ever made, I thought that it wouldn't even move when it got out of there. And they had to lure me out -- I was in a terrible funk -- to go out and see it in front of an audience. It scared the hell out of me. And I pretended like I wasn't there, you know. And so, we were sitting in the balcony in Warner's theater in Hollywood, 1938, and the cartoon came on and there was a little hesitation. And the little girl sitting in front of me said to her mother, she said, "Mommy, I knew we should have come here." You know, "I knew we should have come here." The tenses get all mixed up. But I wanted to adopt her and take her home, because she was laughing at six or eight years old. She was past that terrible age. If she had been five she would have destroyed me.

The remarkable thing, I think, about all creative endeavors, whether it be music, or art, or writing, or anything else is that it is not competitive, except with yourself. And all business, and all manufacturing, and everything that's presented to the public is competitive. They are trying to present the same object perhaps under a different name to supersede the other person and it's competitive, it's a foot race. But art can't be.
One thing is you don't know what the other guy is doing. I'm talking about good writing and good art. It can't be competitive.

You said that you actually have this fear that you might wake up and not be funny?

Chuck Jones: Yeah, or that you might make a picture and you've lost the whole skill. Arthur Rubinstein said that when he walked out on a stage and saw 2,000 people who had paid money to see him perform, he said, "I could not give them less than the best that I have." And that's what I feel. You have no right to diminish an audience's expectations. You have to give them everything that you have. And with children, with anything that's supposedly being done for children, the requirement becomes much more stringent. You've got to do the best you can. You have no right to pull back. You have no right to "write for children." You do the best thing that you can do. And the audiences -- for children -- all the more so, because you're building a child's expectation of what is good and what is bad. And all this stuff -- the word "kidvid," which is used so freely, is one of the ugliest words in the English language. It means you're writing down to children. How are you going to build children up by writing down to them?

There is a one proof always, as to what makes a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book. If it doesn't, it has no chance. Every film should be pursued in that way. I've always felt that the very best I can do is the very least I can do. I don't think about the audience, I think about me. And I think about how grateful I am that I blundered into that group of whimsical, wild, otterish type people that are in there, all of them nutty and all of them intense. Because don't forget, we talked a lot about how free times were then, but every one of us had to turn out 10 pictures a year, in order to get the 30 that Warner Brothers needed. And so, it was frivolous, to be sure, plenty of frivolity and plenty of laughter, but for every bit of laughter there has to be 90 percent of work.

I do three to 400 drawings on every picture -- the three to 400 pictures that I used. But sometimes... I might draw 50 drawings trying to get one expression, so that it will look right for Bugs, or Daffy. Or something like this. Sometimes it came quickly, like writing, sometimes you come to a dead stop. And I'd have to haul off. I'd have to go and do something, because I couldn't break through, couldn't find what the guy was supposed to be doing, and that's all. You don't have to worry about drawing. After a while it's as easy to draw Daffy, or Bugs, or anything as just movement. I know how to do that, but what's he thinking about? And I have to get that expression to indicate what he's thinking about.

You've said of your work directing animation, that there's a sense in which you're almost married to the character. Could you talk about that?

Chuck Jones: Yes. You depend on them. You have to trust one another. In a lot of marriages, people don't, and that results in bad pictures and bad marriages.

Often, when I'm halfway through a picture, I don't know how the hell I'm going to end it? And, then I have to think more carefully, "What would Bugs Bunny do in a situation like this?" In other words, I can't think of what I would do, or what I think Bugs Bunny should do. I have to think as Bugs Bunny, not of Bugs Bunny. And drawing them, as I say, is not difficult. Just like an actor dressed like Hamlet can walk across and look like Hamlet. But boy, when he gets into the action, he has to be thinking as Hamlet.

Tell us that little anecdote about the writer who wrote to his grandmother that he was writing scripts for Bugs Bunny.

Chuck Jones: Yeah.

Bill Scott, he later did most of the work on Rocky and Bullwinkle. He was the voice of the moose, and other voices. He was the lead writer. He was bright. After the war, he came to work for us as a writer. And he was very proud he was there and he wrote a letter to his grandmother in Denver and told her he was writing scripts for Bugs Bunny. And she wrote back a rather peckish letter that indicated she wasn't very happy about that. She said, "I don't see why you have to write scripts for Bugs Bunny. He's funny enough just the way he is." He was delighted with that, we were delighted with it, too. If you want to know what a triumph is, it's the feeling that people really believe these characters live, just like we do. But if we don't, there's no chance anybody else is going to.

Where do you see animation going now? How do you feel about the way it's going?

Chuck Jones: Animation is going very well right now. And to a great extent because these young people at Disney that are doing the films. We must understand this is a whole new generation that's starting with the Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver, and The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, and all done by people in their 30s and 20s. And that's where we started. We were all young like that.

When I went into animation I was like 17, and the old man of the business was Walt Disney, who was 29. Walt Disney was not 40 by the time he finished Fantasia, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Pinocchio. And the people that worked with him were younger than that. So it takes young people. And that's what I'm -- I think I've just about gotten to where I've finished to work out a deal with Warner Brothers to do some more films. But I want to be the old man that pulls together the young guys today. If I can, I want to be a magnet, pulling in creative young people from the art schools, and get them started again, doing some of the old characters, but in new stories, and so on. But new characters too, and hopefully a Warner Brothers feature. That's what I'd like to do. And I've written a couple of scripts that are not too bad, I think.

What is directing animation?

Chuck Jones: Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you. If the coyote is falling, and he looks at the audience and holds up a sign saying, "Please end this picture before I hit." That's his way of expressing himself since he can't talk. He does a couple of pictures, but mostly he does not. But, I have to make that particular drawing to show the attitude I want on the drawing. Plus the action of getting in there, the action of running, if he's going to fly like Batman, or falling over the cliff. Also, I have timed the entire scene. It scares cameramen and anybody that works behind the camera to find out that in animation in Warner Brothers we weren't allowed to edit. You couldn't over-shoot, it was too expensive. So all of us as directors had to learn to time the entire picture on music, on bar sheets, just like you were writing a symphony. That's carrying it on a bit, but anyway -- so by the time it came out to 540 feet, that's six minutes. Leon Schlesinger wouldn't let us make them any longer than six minutes, and the exhibitor wouldn't let us make them any shorter than six minutes, so they had to be six minutes. So we had to learn to do that, and it drives people like George Lucas or Spielberg crazy. "How can you make a picture without editing?"

Well, it is edited, but it's edited before it goes into work. There are a few live action directors, like Hitchcock that shot a meager amount, but not the way we did it. At Disney's, they always have enough money so they could over-shoot. They could do entire sequences and take them out.

It was heartbreaking, of course, for the animator. Because where an actor might have a 15-second, or 20-second scene, even if they did it three or four times, it would take less than 20 minutes. But with the animator, if he's animated a scene that runs 20 seconds, it might be two week's work that's been thrown out.

Music is such a key element in those Warner Brothers cartoons. You must have a musical bent.

Chuck Jones: I know something about it, but mainly through experience working with people like Carl Stalling and Milt Feindel. These were two incredible people with great memories. Stalling was particularly useful because he had been a silent-movie organist in Kansas City.

In the Road Runner, for instance, people think of that as just helter-skelter, but it wasn't. A big percentage of the music was Smetana's Bartered Bride music. And whenever I had undersea stuff or so on, I always used Mendelssohn's Overture to Fingal's Cave. Later, when we did How the Grinch Stole Christmas, we used original music, but curiously enough, the Christmas music was done to a square dance call. We used it, because the rhythm sounded right, it was very cheery.

Thanks for talking with us. And thanks for all the great cartoons.