I once was replaced as a columnist by Erma Bombeck. Whom I actually had come to know. She was less expensive and unlikely to irritate local advertisers. But that weekly kept me alive with cover stories, mostly about events where black tux and blue jeans was not inappropriate. Got a double-breasted number with huge Talking Heads shoulder pads at a second-hand store on Northwest Twenty-First Street.
I have been noodling this idea of close encounters with the famed kind. You’d be amazed the folks I’ve spent time with. Maybe not. But I know I am. Chuck Jones is arguably the most famous man in cartooning this side of Walt Disney.(8/20/91) – JDW
Asked why he was coming to Portland’s creative conference, Jones replies, “I don’t really know. They invited me and I said, ‘Sure. Thank you.’ I’m always flattered when someone calls me creative.”
The voice of a much younger man.
What does creativity mean to Jones? “It ‘s a pretty imponderable thing. Grant Wood said, ‘I get most of my inspiration when I’m looking at a cow.’ I don’t think there’s any way of knowing when the good things will happen to you.
“Creativity, I think, is really something somebody else decides you are. It’s really not what you think you are. A young man came to Robert Frost and asked through a mutual friend to read something he had written. Frost looked at him and asked, ‘Well, what do you do? And the young man says, ‘I’m a poet. Frost replied,’ The term poet is a gift word. You can’t give it to yourself.’
“The term ‘gift word’, to me, is one of the most astonishing. The whole thing about creativity is that it must be decided by others, particularly your peers. It’s one of the greatest things in the world, when somebody in your own class looks at your work and say, “Boy, you can draw.”
Creativity is a very mysterious thing. Even people who produce babies don’t understand what they’re doing.
If you can draw, or if you can write…the only crime is a person who can draw who stops drawing. That is criminal. I mean it’s foolish and stupid, too, because you’ve spent all your life doing this…I remember when they shut us down at Warner Brothers and a lot of the others went on to limited animation. When they could do better. I guess because they felt they were justified, they had to make a living. Well, we all have to make livings. I won’t begrudge them for going the way many of them did, but… I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t a good trade for me. I figured it’s too late now, I’m too old and I’ve spent too many years learning.
So, I couldn’t do any good short subjects. In the mid to late ’60’s I looked around to see what else I could do to preserve my dignity and put a reasonable amount of bread in my hand. That led to half-hour television specials like How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. All of these are full animation and that’s my trade.
(How successful have these later efforts been, I wondered.) The Grinch is in his 26th year. That answer your question?
They’re all still making money for me. Of course, I never had any money from Warner Bros. When I left Warner, I left with exactly the same amount of money I appeared with.
At Warner Bros., you were called a creator of a character if you directed it totally. A lot of people did Bugs Bunny and the rest of those characters, so nobody’s quite sure. We all did Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. We sorta traded them back and forth. They became more interesting characters as we each discovered different things about them.
Most rabbits have 500 or 600 children. Bugs had four fathers. Tex, Chris, Walt and Chuck.
I directed all the Road Runners. I did all the Pepe Le Pews.
It’s a lot easier to humanize animals than to humanize humans. One of the problems with Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs always was the serious problems animating humans. For one thing, all of us know what a human character looks like and how it moves.
Bugs is no more a rabbit than I am. Occasionally, you get characters like Bambi, that act and move like real animals. But can talk to each other. They can’t usually talk to people, but they can talk to each other.
The animal character more naturally falls into your lap. The basic reason is this. Animation is a means of going where live action can’t go. Nearly all of the great cartoons have dealt with things you can’t with live action.
I mean, if I could find a coyote and a road runner, a real one, to do what what my coyote and road runner did, I’d probably shoot it in live action. Since I can’t, the only way to go is with animation.
I first discovered the coyote in a book by Mark Twain, ROUGHING IT. I was six years old. I just stored it away as one of those things I felt appealing and exciting and wonderful. Many years later I had a chance to use it. Same thing with many of the characters. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was read to me when I was young by my father. It always stuck with me. When I had a chance to have it made, I leaped at the chance.
I don’t think you can do any better than to say that animation is primarily concerned with doing things you can’t do with live action. Even the Seven Dwarfs, because they were actually dwarfs. They weren’t really little people, like in the Wizard of Oz. They were fully animated, fully recognizable dwarfs. Not dwarfs in the human sense, but dwarfs as they actually would have lived.
I think everybody is naturally creative. Nearly all great athletes can move from one sport to another. Sandy Koufax was not only a helluva baseball pitcher, he was also a very good basketball player. A wizard at golf. He had a natural thing going into it that made him good. It made him an excellent pitcher. He would’ve been good at any sport he chose to pursue. He had all the physical facilities. This is true of most athletes, I think.
Well, there are certain people that seem to have a slight grace note that enables them to be a little better artist or a little better writer, poet and so on.
Anybody can learn to draw. Anybody can learn to draw competently. Anybody can become a writer. They’re not going to be Hemingway, they’re not going to be Shakespeare.
‘How can I become a genius?’. Well, of course, you can’t. You’ve got to have something that other people don’t have.
When I was in art school, a teacher looked at us and said, “Everyone of you has 100,000 bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everybody.” So, no matter how much ability or inherent talent you might have, you still have to do 100,000 drawings. You still have to write the one hundred or two hundred bad short stories, before you can write a good one.
Maybe you’ll turn out to be great, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is, do you learn how to do something that you enjoy doing, even if somebody’s not paying you to do it. That’s the whole matter with me.
I’ve been extremely fortunate. Everybody doesn’t have that. If I had been born an Eskimo, the chances are pretty good I wouldn’t have been an animator. There has to be a bit of luck tied into it. If you were born in Samoa, the odds are you wouldn’t writing this interview.
(I wouldn’t be tall, white and skinny, either.)
Artur Rubenstein practices – when he’s alive – he practices at least four hours a day. I don’t think most people are willing to do that.
People say, “I can’t draw a straight line.” Let’s say, you can’t even draw a crooked line, but you can draw better than you think you do, because writing is drawing. What’s surprising is that people who can write small can also write big….
Ask someone to make a round ball, well, they’d fumble, poop around trying to make a ball. If you ask them to make a capital O, they make a perfect circle. If you ask them to make two l’s, like in llama, they can do so, and they can make it any size you want.
So, everybody can draw, it’s just a matter of applying the tools of the trade into something you want. Which is exactly what you do when you write.
To me, talent is something that will show eventually, but you have to go through all the motions as if you didn’t know what the hell you were doing. Nobody is born with the ability to draw. Or write. Or sculpt. Or play the violin.
(After 25 minutes, I run out of gas.)
I don’t think you’re ever going to get anybody to say anything. The wisdom is YOU CANNOT DO IT UNLESS YOU TAKE THE TROUBLE TO DO IT. As far as drawing the animated characters, there’s a basic rule, and that is you have to care about what you work with. That’s why this Saturday morning stuff is so bad. It’s poorly drawn. The so-called producers and so-called artists draw down to the children. In my opinion, you always draw up to anything you’re doing. With the viewpoint that you cannot do what you should do, that is you can’t do as well as you should. As long as you believe that, there’s some kind of hope for you.
If you do something and say good enough for children, but it’s not good enough for adults, there’s something grotesquely wrong. It’s a shameful thing to do to produce these pictures that are supposedly for children.
Take any great children’s book, or any great children’s movie, or any great children’s anything, always, it’s a solemn, dependable rule, it can always be read or viewed with pleasure by adults. Treasure Island, Alice In Wonderland, Mary Poppins, every one of them.
Our pictures, because we cared, our pictures came to be watched with pleasure by adults, perhaps more pleasure than children. The basic thing is you have to care. You have to respect your trade, you’ve got to do what’s necessary to make that trade an honorable one, and you have to, you have to face the word “professional” as the most honest thing you can do.
The man or woman or anybody else who is a professional in their trade, and that’s what we were, then that’s about the best you can do for yourself.
Anybody can draw if they want to. The gift word is “artist.” Most great animators are reluctant to use the term. Frank Lloyd Wright always had trouble using the word “architect”, because he felt it was too big a word. He liked to think he was building homes or building whatever it may be. Even when he appeared at a trial in Pittsburgh, the bailiff swore him in. He was asked, ‘What do you do?’ Wright answered, ‘I’m the world’s greatest architect.’ Afterward, the reporters assailed him. Wright’s response? ‘I was under oath.’
That doesn’t mean, however, that he thought he was the greatest architect who ever lived. He said, ‘I’m the world’s greatest architect’, because so many people had told him he was. He just wanted to establish his identity. He didn’t necessarily believe what other people believed.
The nice thing about making animated cartoons in thirty-eight years at Warner Bros. was we didn’t know what we were doing. We hadn’t any idea. Nevertheless, we respected what we did and we were honest with one another and we tried to make one another laugh. We hoped that other people would laugh, too.
We didn’t know what the audience was. We knew it wasn’t all children. We were pretty sure it wasn’t all adults. It may have been all psychotic. We had no way of knowing, but we did know that if we made pictures that we thought were funny and other people thought they were funny, too, we’d hold our jobs.
That was our basic thing. You do like to hold your job.
Creativity means somebody is willing to pay you to do what you do well. That is, to support you. Throughout history, there is no artist who doesn’t have a patron. The patron may be money. It was in the later years for a Matisse or Cezanne. It never was with Van Gogh. The only thing that saved him as a patron was his brother. Everybody has to have, in terms of being paid to do what you do, your patron is whoever is paying you.
(A patron would be nice.)
All creativity, all talent, is determined by history. It’s never determined by the person who is doing it. Because it’s only what somebody says you are that makes you what you are. Even historians. Probably the greatest soldiers who ever lived never had a chance to lead a regiment.
There were probably great artists who never had a chance, who never had the tools, who were never in a position to produce. We don’t know. It’s obvious that talent must have the tools available. Paganini couldn’t have been a great violinist unless somebody invented the violin.
(Jones knows one key to his esteemed reputation is simply longevity. He’s lived long enough to be judged historically.) Tex Avery hadn’t any idea he would be revered; he’s practically a saint in France, where they really love him. But he never knew it. Van Gogh never knew it. Picasso is probably the only one who really knew how much people thought of his work. But it didn’t seem to change his ideas. He was always experimenting.
(How do you feel about your work? “What?” Apparently he doesn’t hear me. Maybe he’s just biding his time. How do you feel about your work?,” I asked again. This time he laughs. Heartily.)
“I seem to have brought a lot of people a lot of laughs. That was what it was intended to do. But, uh, uh, again, I, I, you know, Mark Twain one time said he, he said, “I never disliked a man so much I wasn’t willing he should admire me.” I’m very happy to see people admire my work, but keeping always in mind…” He wants to say it right. ‘G.K. Chesterton said one time, “I do not take myself seriously, but I take my work deadly seriously.”
“That’s the way I feel. If you don’t start taking yourself seriously, you’re missing the boat.”
***
In a career spanning over 60 years, Jones made more than 300 animated films, winning three Oscars as director and in 1996 an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. During the Golden Age of animation Jones helped bring to life many of Warner Bros. most famous characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. The list of characters he created himself includes Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin Martian, Pepe le Pew, Michigan J. Frog and many others.