Film Salutes Cartoonist Chuck Jones

Monday, November 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

LOS ANGELES (AP) â€” Animation bard Chuck Jones and his merry band of players â€” Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck and so many others â€” are taking a bow on PBS' ``Great Performances.''

Highbrow heretics who doubt that Jones deserves to be toasted by the lofty public television series may want to consider the following:

â€” Director Peter Bogdanovich says Jones' animation ``remains, like all good fables and only the best of art, both timeless and universal.''

â€” Steven Spielberg says Jones' 1996 lifetime achievement Oscar was ``a way of everybody saying, `Thanks for giving me more imagination than I ever would have had if it weren't for you.'''

â€” And there's this rave from critic Leonard Maltin for a Michigan J. Frog cartoon: ''`One Froggy Evening' is as perfect a film as I ever hope to see.''

They are just a few of the admirers gushing, justifiably, over the remarkable producer-director-artist in ``Chuck Jones: Extreme and In-Betweens, A Life in Animation,'' airing 8 p.m. EST Wednesday on Thirteen/WNET's ``Great Performances.''

The 90-minute film by Margaret Selby is an illuminating and engaging look at his achievements. It includes interviews with Jones, fans like Spielberg and colleagues such as background artist Maurice Noble, whose contributions receive fair notice.

There's a generous helping of film clips as well (watch for the endearing and edgy ``Feed the Kitty'').

``Chuck really is a master,'' said Selby, who spent two years on the documentary. ``We're so lucky to have him, and I want people to appreciate him. ... He's a national treasure.''

More than 300 animated films bear the credit ``Directed by Charles M. Jones,'' most of them no more than 540 feet of film and six minutes in length.

But what choice minutes they are. In ``What's Opera Doc?'' (1957) Elmer Fudd and nemesis Bugs Bunny take on new roles in a brilliantly drawn Wagnerian spoof, with Bugs â€” in drag â€” making a fetching Brunhilde.

In 1965, Jones explored the geometry of romance in ``The Dot and the Line,'' winning an Academy Award (he has a total of four Oscars) and proving that he could imbue even the simplest squiggle with personality plus.

And then there are the clever Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote chases that still race through the heads of so many children, and former children.

Jones, who continues writing, teaching and sketching at a vigorous 88 â€” ``I can't stop drawing. It's a disease'' â€” is, in conversation, as full of wit and verve as his work.

Asked his opinion of the PBS biography, he replies waggishly: ``I have one problem with it. It's the subject matter.''

Levity aside, Jones considers animation art a serious business, one he joined in 1934 at the Leon Schlesinger Studio. The company was later sold to Warner Bros., which became his home for decades and where he helped develop such classic characters as Bugs, Daffy and Porky Pig, and created Pepe Le Pew as well as Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.

``Somebody came along early in my life and paid me for what I enjoyed doing,'' Jones said in an interview. ``That was so strange and remarkable. To this day, I still think it's the best thing that could happen to you.''

He later headed the animation division at MGM Studios where, in 1966, he directed and co-produced the television special ``Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas,'' working with author Theodor S. Geisel (Seuss).

Unlike other animation filmmakers, Jones said, he and his Warner Bros. colleagues avoided being chained to one set of characters or style.

``Not that we were encouraged,'' he said, adding bluntly: ``Leon Schlesinger didn't give a damn what a cartoon was about, as long as he could sell it. And Jack Warner was too stupid to know a good cartoon from a bad one. He'd buy anything.''

Jones, however, refused to create just anything. He and his team adhered to strict artistic standards in bringing their characters to life.

``Nearly all cartoons, animated or otherwise, are dealing with believable characters. A Grinch has to move like a human, albeit a distorted one,'' he said. ``Respect. That's the whole point. Respect of everything.''

That means a character's behavior had to be as genuine as its look. Jones borrowed wholesale from his feelings about himself to draft, for instance, the hapless Daffy Duck and the romantically challenged Pepe Le Pew, who never gets the girl.

He also sought to make universal art that transcended language.

``I was determined in my pictures that people would be able to tell what was happening by the action. ... I always ran the picture without any sound to see if it would work and if you could follow the story without any dialogue. And you always could.''

(As for cartoon violence, he says, ``I'm a master of not how to shoot a rabbit, but of how NOT to shoot a rabbit.'')

Jones has written several books, including two autobiographies, and is working on one about drawing. He clearly remains fascinated with the process of putting cartoons into motion, carefully describing for a listener how a scene showing Elmer Fudd taking a pratfall was crafted.

``There were seven different cuts of him falling. We had him fall toward the camera, across the camera, away from it. We were intercutting so fast, you could really feel it when he hit the ground with a clever sound effect,'' he said, satisfaction in his voice.

Despite his lengthy and acclaimed career, Jones isn't drawing himself out of the animation picture.

``Michelangelo started on a statue when he was 92 that, I believe, would have taken him 40 years to complete. I love it,'' he says.

``He didn't believe in time. I don't think you can be an artist or a writer or anything else and believe that time will set in on you and keep you from completing your heart's desire.''

â€”â€”â€”

On the Net:

http://www.chuckjones.com.