This book has no one to blame and very many to praise and to love. Like my contemporaries Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck, I have little time and no inclination to find fault or failure in others, for I have too many abundant and stimulating faults and failures of my very own. Recognition of my own ineptitudes has always led me to better understanding of my trade. Jumblings, mistakes, and errors in judgment are the essence, the very fabric of humor.
While I have not attempted a thorough and exact recounting of the facts of my life, I have tried to recapture something of the spirit of my involvement with animation. The odd and wonderful and curious truth is this: the animated cartoons I directed are now the facts—my report cards. The varied memories of their origins are often, and perhaps rightfully so, fictional.
For me the startling, unbelievable matter is this: when I was nineteen years old, somebody offered to pay me to draw. For over fifty years and over 250 films, other somebodies have, amazingly, persisted in continuing to reward me for doing what I love to do.
NOTE: For those who seek a chronological thread, no matter how thin, on which to hang the following facts and figuratives, I nervously recommend the Appendix.
Homes deducting the batty old income tax
“Why do animated cartoonists use animals?” For the same reason that Aesop, La Fontaine, Kipling, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame did: it is easier and more believable to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans.
A young man came to work with us at Warner Bros. Cartoons as a writer shortly after World War II and promptly and proudly wrote home to his grandmother in Denver that he was writing scripts for Bugs Bunny.
“I can’t understand why you’re writing scripts for Bugs Bunny,” the old lady replied with some asperity. “He’s funny enough just as he is.”
Believability. That is what we were striving for. Not believability by the audience; that will follow. But belief in the life of characters—by the writer, the artist, the director, the animator. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word “animation”: to invoke life.
What was implicit in what the old lady was saying was that our job was not to invent what Bugs Bunny did but to report his doings. Just as I, at seven, upon reading Tom Sawyer, would have been outraged at the suggestion that Mark Twain or anybody else invented Tom and Huckleberry Finn and their company. Tom Sawyer happened. He was not imaginary. He was real. He still is real. What else can he be but real? And there can be no doubt that Mark Twain shared that belief.
Character always comes first, before the physical representation. Just as it is with all living things, including human beings. We are not what we look like. We are not even what we sound like. We are how we move; in other words, our personalities. And our personalities are shaped by what we think, by where we come from, by what we have experienced. And that personality is unique to each of us.
Up to the advent of Johnson, I had little reason to doubt that the differences between cats were purely visual: size, color, sex (although sexual differences in cats seemed to be a secret guarded well by cats; I was not a precocious child at seven—just curious). If there were personality differences, I was unaware of them until Johnson padded in on little fog feet and taught me that first and most important lesson of animation: individuality. Yes, in looking back, I can see that it all began with Johnson, because Johnson demonstrated with such vivid certainty the whole truth of the matter: it is the individual, the oddity, the peculiarity that counts. If Johnson had stood up, which was unlikely since he was a cat, and pounded on the rostrum with his shoe, he could not have made his point more clearly to my seven-year-old mind: the only things worth watching in this or any other world are those that identify and overcome the ordinary. That summer morning in Balboa was a turning point for a small boy whose thoughts up to that time were concerned, like his cousin the shark, only with gastronomic matters.
And so I was all unaware that the first step in my destiny to become an animation director would come silently out of a salmon-pink dawn, each step leaving a small, precise, dry paw print on the dew-moist sand. Through the gray salt-rimed boards of our back fence he moved with the self-assured, liquid, dignified delicacy of a world-class welterweight.
With my fascinated nose waffled against the rust-brown screen of our second-floor sleeping porch, I watched him tiptoe through the dune grass and yellow oyster daisies to the foot of our back porch, then look appraisingly up at me and utter a single laconic “Mckgnaow.”*
He moved into our house that morning, bag and baggage. The bag was that cat bag all cats live in, one of the few characteristics he shared with other cats. He sat fat and walked thin like other cats, but the resemblance to other cats stopped there.
His baggage was what appeared to be a very old, very used tongue depressor, fastened securely about his neck with a bit of tarry string, bearing in violet indelible ink the crude inscription: JOHNSON. Whether this was his name, that of his former proprietors, or his blood type we were unable to determine, since he discussed his past not at all and responded to the name Johnson as well as any other, which was not at all; actually going in response to that name only to my mother and then only when she offered him
