Relative sizes of our unit’s animators and animated characters
Films by this unit won two Academy Awards in 1950: For Scent-imental Reasons, with Pepé Le Pew, and the documentary award for the Public Health Service, So Much for So Little (co-written with Friz Freleng), the first and only time an animated short has won in the documentary category.
In 1955 I had a four-month stint at Disney when Mr. Jack Warner, responding to the obvious logic that all films would soon be 3-D and that all babies would soon be born with one green and one red retina, closed the Warner cartoon plant.
Mr. Warner’s insight fortunately proved to be slightly flawed in logic and the Warner cartoon plant inhaled and exhaled again, only to go permanently rigor as well as mortis in 1962.
I have always fancied myself a lay scientist (as well as a lay astronomer, lay zoologist, and lay man) and directed during those fading years the cartoon sequences in Gateways to the Mind, a television special for the Bell Telephone Company dealing with the human senses. I was surprised to find that a good case can be made for only one sense, that of touch, or an equally good case can be made for 100 or more individual responses—such as pressure, heat, cold, etc.: so much for the five senses.
In 1962 Dorothy and I wrote an original story and screenplay for UPA, Gay Purr-ee, with the voices of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Hermione Gingold, and Red Buttons, and directed by Abe Levitow.
After leaving Warners, or rather, as reported earlier, having Warners pulled out from under me, I did a little oil and water-color painting and drawing and sold some of these objets d’art at the Cowie and Manhattan Galleries to gullible friends who probably didn’t know paintings from a hole-in-the-ground. Most of the paintings had been done in Europe anyway, the styles stolen from obscure artists unlikely to be recognized in America. Today I am again engaged in easel painting, depicting in oils Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, etc., in rank imitation of the masters.
Lithograph: Daffy Duck on DECEMBER MORN
Early in 1964, M-G-M for some reason wanted some more Tom ’n’ Jerrys and couldn’t afford Hanna and Barbera, who had originated the series. So I rallied my old crew around me and produced some Tom ’n’ Jerrys, and also Frank Tashlin’s The Bear That Wasn’t, Walt Kelly’s The Pogo Family Birthday Special, and The Dot and the Line, which won an Academy Award in 1965, as well as How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Horton Hears a Who with Dr. Seuss.
During this time at M-G-M I also produced, co-directed, and co-authored the screenplay for The Phantom Tollbooth, a full-length feature. A critical success, a box-office question mark. Tollbooth keeps resurfacing on call from film festivals (FILMEX in Los Angeles; Deauville in France) and has been recently issued as a home videocassette.
For a year I was a vice president of the American Broadcasting Company, hoping to help the cause of children’s television programming. With the help of the National Film Board of Canada, the Zagreb Studios, and many talented cartoonists such as Johnny Hart, Don Arioli of the National Film Board, and Hank Ketcham, Curiosity Shop was produced: a seventeen-unit one-hour program for Saturday morning. The program can be described in a kindly way as highly ordinary, but it did establish in my porous but not always selective mind that short subjects and television specials were better arenas for talented cel washers and that seventeen anythings a year was beyond my powers. Perhaps, in the light of the shows now disfiguring Saturday-morning television, beyond anyone’s powers.
At this time I also served as executive producer for Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, done in toto by the incredibly talented Richard Williams in London. My creative contribution was to find a sponsor and a network.
Lithograph: Bugs Bunny as Chagall would have painted him
Today I am once again with Warner Bros. as a consultant and roving front man.
In 1962 I established my own independent production company, Chuck Jones Enterprises. Chuck Jones Enterprises produced nine half-hour prime-time television specials, all produced, written, and directed by me. They are: The Cricket in Times Square, A Very Merry Cricket, and Yankee Doodle Cricket (for ABC); three stories from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Mowgli’s Brothers (both of which received the Parents’ Choice Awards in 1985), and The White Seal (for CBS); two specials populated by some of the classic characters from Warner Bros., Carnival of the Animals (Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny playing the music of Saint-Saëns and reading the verse of Ogden Nash) and A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court (the Warner Bros. gang in a tale “plagiarized from Mark Twain” and later titled Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court). Both were aired on CBS. Also for CBS: Raggedy Ann and Andy in: The Great Santa Claus Caper, and The Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile, in which I took the classic Johnny Gruelle characters on winter and Halloween adventures, and added a Raggedy dog called, for some reason, Raggedy Arthur.
C.J. at his Tower 12 Studio
In 1978 Dorothy Webster Jones, friend, critic, writer, dance partner, wonderful mother and grandmother, died after a lifetime of support, encouragement, and love to animation, to her husband, and to life itself, leaving three splendid grandchildren: Todd, Craig, and Valerie Kausen, and now three great-grandchildren, Alexander and Brittany to Craig and his wife, Mary, and Jessica to Todd and his wife, Jan.
Great great-grandchildren!
Brittany (Craig and Mary)
Alexander (Craig and Mary)
Jessica (Todd and Jan)
Grand
