HOW CHUCK JONES DEFINED AMERICA THROUGH CARTOONS
- 09/10/2014 by R. C. Baker (Village Voice)

In the early 1950s, animation director Chuck Jones was idly sketching a bull when a Warner Bros. producer walked by and said, "I don't want any bullfights — bullfights aren't funny." Jones, like Warner's most popular animated star, was always ready to oppose those who presumed to give orders, and later told an interviewer, "Now, I had no intention of making a bullfight picture, but after he said that, I went ahead." "Bully for Bugs" (1953) opens with Bugs Bunny popping out of a burrow in a Spanish bullring — "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!" — followed by six minutes of pas-de-deux mayhem, including a Rube Goldbergian sequence featuring axle grease, sandpaper, a match, a long fuse, a flying bull, and a keg of TNT.

The Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective of Jones's protean output features expressive character sketches, layered acetate animation cels, storyboards, annotated scripts, layout drawings, background paintings by Jones's collaborators, and other artifacts from Hollywood's golden age of animation. Additionally, MOMI has scheduled various slates of cartoons to project on its big screen in all their original, Technicolor glory.

Jones (1912-2002) believed an animator was "an actor with a pencil," and the lively model sheets he drew to conduct his small army of draftsmen through the gestures, postures, and facial expressions of Bugs, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and other studio stalwarts can be viewed as method acting, graphite-style. "I felt that somebody should always try to impose his will on Bugs," Jones once explained. "That gave him a reason to act, and I couldn't understand the character unless he had a reason for what he did."

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