Termite Terrace

In 1912 the Titanic sank, a man named Funk coined the word "vitamin," Robert Scott reached the South Pole, "Piltdown Man" was exhumed, Jim Joyce turned thirty, and Sam Beckett six. Also New Mexico was admitted to the Union (hence Bugs Bunny's formulaic "Left turn at Albuquerque"; and later the roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus, would become New Mexico's state bird). Moreover, the 1912 autumnal equinox—21 September, a Saturday—saw Charles Martin (Chuck) Jones born in Spokane.

That year was pre-TV, pre-cinema, even pre-radio. (Yes, wireless and movies existed, but no, they didn't dominate the time of any folk save tech fanatics.) That left, well, books, so if you felt unsleepy your recourse was reading. It was also your rainy-day recourse, and, when necessary, your way of cocooning yourself when you were the third of four and your siblings were, all three, assertive. ("Margaret Barbara Jones, master weaver and designer, teacher and fabric designer;

Dorothy Jane Jones, sculptor, writer, and illustrator; Richard Kent Jones, painter, photographer, teacher, and printmaker": that's the roll-call that also includes "Charles Martin Jones, animator and animated-cartoon director.")^[1]

He was formed by literacy and is still focused on it. In the heat of discourse he'll drop a phrase from a book every few sentences, and frequently pause to credit it. In his wonderful memoir, Chuck Amuck, he recalls a long-ago cat named Johnson uttering "a single laconic 'Mckgnaow.' " A footnote credits James Joyce's Ulysses, "but Johnson said it first." Now what Leopold Bloom's hungry cat said that Dublin June morning was something slightly different: "Mkgnao."^[2] The point is, Jones is quoting from memory, something the truly literate have the confidence to do. He was writing a book that doesn't pretend to scholarship, and felt no special impulse to reach for the shelf, flip pages, verify. His points get made: Johnson, an authentic cat, spoke authentic cat-speech, and Joyce, an authentic writer, got cat-speech right. As does Jones, thanks to the real Johnson reinforcing Joycean fiction the way (as Joyce fans will verify) reality normally does.

Chuck Jones insists on the reliability of authentic writers. Here's Mark Twain on the coyote: "The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long sharp face with a

[1] Chuck Amuck, p. 45.

[2] And with further urgency, "Mrkgnao!" and "Mrkrgnao!" Readers in need of rigorous detail about feline vocal resources should consult Muriel Beadle, The Cat (1977), pp. 186–8.

slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want." Whether that's the authentic coyote of the wilds I've not the experience to say, but it's unmistakably the Wile E. Coyote that Chuck Jones created in 1949, thirty years after he'd "devoured" (he says) Twain's Roughing It at the ripe age of seven.

It's interesting that he doesn't mention being taught to read. In those days many lifelong readers weren't taught to read, any more than they were taught to walk. They just somehow picked it up, frequently by listening to a parent read while a finger moved along the lines. What Jones does mention, more than once, is the abundance of books amid which he grew up. His father, who emerges as fascinatingly feckless, moved the family frequently, always to a rented house so well stocked with books it once took the lot of them a five-year stay to read everything. And they did read everything, trash alongside treasure, discerning a difference but reading both kinds anyway. "It was entirely impossible for me to read without thinking, and reading The Bobbsey Twins, for instance, made me think of throwing up."

He'll also dwell on his father's admiration for a writer who understood gists and how to get them together.

Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.

"That's Rudyard Kipling!" said Mr. Charles Adams Jones. "Everything you need to know about his subject, Cro-Magnon man: Who. What. When. Where. In poetic form. In one sentence." If, despite T. S. Eliot's approval, Kipling's repute

does not currently thrive, still it's interesting to note how rapidly Eliot had put "everything you need to know" about J. Alfred Prufrock into twelve opening lines in 1909, and how quickly Chuck Jones got the gist of a demolition worker with dollar-signs in his eyes into the opening moments of One Froggy Evening (1955). Jones had fewer than 400 seconds in which to present his whole fable, never forgetting the need to keep an audience continuously spellbound. No one else got Warner Bros. cartoons under way with such economy.

No one else, either, had so literary a conception of character. Where it had sufficed other animation directors to make Bugs Bunny anarchic, anarchy being the medium's richest tradition, the Bugs of Jones won't declare that This Means War till after his space has been wantonly violated, as by a hunter in Wabbit Season (Duck! Rabbit! Duck! ) or by a furious bull in the ring (Bully for Bugs ). Otherwise Bugs improves his shining hour with the tranquil aid of a carrot, thoughtfully munched. That resembles the care novelists take over motivation, to help as they routinely do a print-bound reader who's unable to see a book's characters unless in what we're not discussing, a "comic book."

Ah, all those books! And Jones's verbal memory for them, up to seven decades later, is incredible. It is simply not true that the human sensibility necessarily divides eye-people from word-people. (Animators are eye-people, yes?)

And another theme: all that paper! The way Chuck Jones tells it, every time his father launched a new enterprise, letterhead got printed on high-quality stock. The supply of such enterprises seemed as inexhaustible as their timing was luckless—who but Jones Sr., with a short option on Signal Hill, would have entrusted geraniums "for the Eastern market" to its oil-saturated earth? The Jones children, though, lived

amid unimaginable quantities of Hammermill Bond paper and Ticonderoga pencils. Consequently, they all became visual artists. When Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League advised a beginning class that their learning process would involve getting rid of the 100,000 bad drawings they had inside them, Chuck Jones was already well past his third hundred thousand.

At the Chouinard Art Institute, as we've noted, he learned among other things the sort of anatomical knack Grim Natwick also commanded, for instance with wrists and knees. A fascinating drawing shows us how, if we've learned to make an image of a human leg that contains some anatomical insight concerning its bones, we have only to adjust a few proportions to draw the leg of a horse, a dog, a cat . . . "Same bones," says the caption in Chuck Amuck; "different lengths

only." So the fact that few animated cartoons used human characters wasn't relevant. As we can see a few pages further on (266–7), the familiar Warner Bros. Repertory Company consisted of humanesque figures with animal faces and proportions. For here, their gazes locked in confrontation, behold a housecat (sitting) and Sylvester (erect on hind legs).^[3] Despite mild similarities of detail they are clearly denizens of different universes; you'd not get a Sylvester by propping that cat erect. Conversely, Bugs in the posture of a crouching rabbit looks cramped and unBugsy. He ought to be upright, one arm akimbo, the other flaunting a carrot. And as for the coyote: the real or zookeeper's coyote, as drawn by Jones, looks rather like a sheep. But Wile E. has arranged his bones in simulation of a hobo's leisure, recumbent, right forepaw supporting an unkempt head on which that scheming expression isn't anything conceivably natural to Canis latrans . ("Dog who howls," yes, that's the coyote's official name. It's noteworthy that Wile E. Coyote in most of some two dozen films didn't utter a sound.)

Let's return briefly to the redoubtable parents. Charles Adams Jones, born on a Friday the thirteenth, was "meant to be a Baptist minister in Texas." His parents, the ones responsible for meaning him to be that, "were born in a tiny town that doesn't exist any more called Adams, Texas, because the ancestors were related to the Adams family." Whew. So, "Father grew up and became conversant with the Bible and was valedictorian of his high school class and received a full scholarship to Carnegie Tech." Unhappily, he couldn't accept

[3] Sylvester? He's the cat best remembered for being obsessed with Tweety the canary. Seldom a Jones character, he generally worked for his designer, Friz Freleng.

it because he had to help support his family. So by 25 he'd become railroad yardmaster in San Francisco, from which his next move was to Panama, where they had their minds on a Canal. "Both my sisters were born in the Panama Canal Zone. And I was conceived there, but born in Spokane, Washington. I never forgave him for that. It's much more elegant to say you were born in Panama, at least I thought so—in the tropics." Father, "a sort of Richard Harding Davis," loved the idea of living in the tropics. So he always dressed in white and wore boots. "God, he was a good-looking, beautiful, handsome man."

Mother? Mabel McQuiddy Martin, "born in a place called Nevada, Missouri." Pronounce that Ne-vay -da. And raised in Schnute, Kansas, where she was "belle of the town." Charles Adams Jones came there to visit a friend, spotted the belle, "hired a pair of spanking bays and a carriage with the fringe on top, swept her off her feet, took her away for a honeymoon in New York and then down to Panama." Next, Metropolitan Life hired C.A.J. to manage its northwest territory; hence the move to Spokane just before the birth of our Charles Martin, who bears his father's first name and his mother's maiden name and goes by "Chuck." C.A.J. didn't like living in Spokane, any more than his son was to relish having been born there instead of in Panama, "so much more elegant to say." So Jones Sr. "headed for Southern California, and that was the last of being wealthy. He kept starting new businesses and failing." And the kids had all that Hammermill Bond to use for drawing-paper, and all those pencils. "I think all kids will draw if they're encouraged to do so" is Chuck's answer to a question about where the talent may have come from. Encouragement, doubtless, is part of the story. But also there was their mother's attitude:

"She was willing to make the sacrifice most parents will not make: she would not criticize, and she would not over-praise. Years later she told me that if we brought a drawing to her, she didn't look at the drawing, she looked at us. And if we seemed to be excited, then she would be excited. But if I just brought a drawing for, you know, just because, then she would look at it . . . and she would never say 'What's that?' or 'Is that Daddy?' or anything like that. She would look at it and say, 'My, you used a lot of blue, didn't you?'

"No criticism. Also no over-praise. Praise probably hurts more than anything else. You come running over with a drawing, and they say, 'Oh, that's wonderful,' and stick it up on the refrigerator. After a while the child says, 'Look, I know all my drawings aren't good.' And loses interest because, obviously, the parent had lost interest."

Chuck Jones was 15 when he entered Chouinard after not graduating from high school, and in the time he spent there he had no glimmer of the use to which he'd one day be putting the anatomy they were teaching him. His stint of cel-washing at the Ub Iwerks establishment (1931) came after some futile months at a commercial art studio, where he was dogged (he says) by a post-Chouinard inability to draw. (Subsequently, he hastens to add, ten years of night school and "the great teacher Donald Graham" would enable him to claim that if he still can't draw he can fake it pretty well. As he assuredly can.)

In 1933, following a distinct lack of success as a freelance portrait sketcher at $1 per, Chuck Jones made the move of his life, to Leon Schlesinger Productions. Schlesinger had previously headed something called Pacific Art and Title, the principal product of which was the dialogue cards on which si-

lent films depended. (The heroine's lips move; then a card: "Oh, Henry . . . I hear . . . horses! ") A feature might use several dozen of those, or up to several hundred. But now that there were soundtracks, audiences could hear the heroine's voice, and the future for dialogue cards seemed bleak. Schlesinger, ever canny, saw how to cut his dependence on cards. He cooked up a three-way deal. He would back a couple of artists named Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, sometime Disney associates, to crank out a cartoon a month; the cartoons in turn he would market to Warner Bros., who would use them to promote songs from their feature films and their sheet-music companies. Thus cash would flow from the Warners to Schlesinger, who would pass no more than he had to back to Harman-Ising^[4] while reserving the rest for necessities such as his yacht. Thus the Looney Tunes were born, and if you think that name carries an echo of Silly Symphonys you are right. The first Looney Tune, Sinkin' in the Bathtub, opened in a Warner-owned theater on Broadway, May 6, 1930. Its star was a li'l ol' black boy named Bosko, and finger-pointers should pause to recall the technical constraints of an era when all cartoon stars were apt to be black: Felix the Cat, Flip the Frog, yes, Mickey Mouse himself. A body you could fill in fast with a brush: that was a great help when you had to turn out hundreds upon hundreds of nigh-identical drawings. (Also, Bosko exploited the tradition of Al Jolson's blackface Jazz Singer, the pioneer talkie and a Warner Bros. production.) A year and a half later, Warners commissioned a second series, called Merrie Melodies. Those were conceived as one-shots, meant to market Warner songs, and

[4] And here it's routine to remark a lovely pairing of names.

for several years every Merrie Melodie was required to contain "at least one complete chorus of a Warner-owned tune."

Harman and Ising had ideas of quality that Leon Schlesinger didn't want to finance, and eventually they terminated the deal and took Bosko with them to MGM. That left Schlesinger owning, as Steve Schneider puts it, "the rights to the phrases 'Looney Tunes,' 'Merrie Melodies,' and 'That's all, folks!' but with no staff and no known characters."^[5] To maintain the cash flow from Warners he hadn't a recourse save to get a staff together. He took over a building on the old Warner lot, lured Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett back from Harman-Ising, and picked up from Disney a few men experienced enough to start in as Production Supervisors, later called Directors. It was in the midst of that turmoil that Charles M. Jones joined the staff: a sometime cel-washer whose in-betweening hadn't made Ub Iwerks think he was worth keeping around. If on some pages of Chuck Amuck the self-deprecation sounds a trifle formulaic, still it's easy to imagine how Jones could have felt that the Warner cartoon operation acquired him, somehow, by mistake. He would stay with it for three productive decades.

Meanwhile, a wonderful plot twist. The second time Chuck Jones was terminated by the Iwerks enterprise (no, you don't need the details; Ub let him go, he sneaked back in, was fired again; it all happened in a few weeks of 1931)—well, the second firing was performed by Ub's secretary, Dorothy Webster, a sociology graduate (U. of Oregon). The ways of courtship being extraterrestial, in 1935 that same Dorothy Webster became Mrs. Charles M. Jones, and in 1937

[5] Steve Schneider, That's All Folks! (1988), p. 40.

mother to Linda Jones, who today, as Linda Jones Clough, runs two companies called Linda Jones Enterprises and Chuck Jones Enterprises, of which a principal activity is "producing, preserving and authenticating drawings and cels from my past, present and future, selling them through major art galleries in the United States." Dorothy Webster Jones, "friend, critic, writer, dance partner,^[6] wonderful mother and grandmother," died in 1978. Five years later Chuck married Marian J. Dern, by profession a writer-photographer. He's been blissfully fortunate, twice.

It was Dorothy, he says, who somehow got him the job at Schlesinger's, back in the time of the breakaway from Harman-Ising. That put Chuck Jones in position to benefit by a major episode in animation history.

For in 1935, twenty-seven-year-old Fred ("Tex") Avery from Taylor, Texas, claiming to be a descendant of Judge Roy Bean, showed up at Schlesinger Productions. He said he'd directed two cartoons for Walter Lantz, though, Steve Schneider says, "no screen credits exist to that effect," and he somehow got put in charge of a new unit, staffed by men who weren't happy where they'd been. They included Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and "a terrific draftsman" named Bob ("Bobe") Cannon. About 1970 Avery was recalling them all as "tickled to death": "They wanted to get a 'new group' going, and 'we could do it' and 'let's make pictures.' It was very encouraging. . . . We worked every night. My gosh, nothing stopped us!" They were installed in a building of their own on the Warner lot—a white one-story bungalow,

[6] A 1954 square-dance book, Five Years of Sets in Order, is introduced by Chuck Jones.

quickly dubbed Termite Terrace once the new crew became aware of other live beings around. Shamus Culhane would remember from his stint there in '43 a place that "looked and stank like the hold of a slave ship," and Michael Maltese, long-time storyman, remembered a colleague who "tried to set fire to it once, just for the hell of it, just to see if it burned. And it wouldn't burn." And before long, in that unlikely place, Chuck Jones, sometime cel-washer and in-betweener and quondam apprentice to Grim Natwick, was animating for Tex Avery.

For reasons that will appear, he couldn't have had a better mentor at just that point in his career. Avery's sense of the animatable universe was formed in the decade when a dotted line from the eye of Felix the Cat could knock over a chipmunk, and he remained impervious to any claim that animation should strive for the Illusion of Life. So an Avery squirrel shakes a boxing glove lest it contain a (shudder!) horseshoe, whereupon a full-sized horse tumbles out head-first, its expression blissfully bland. Or an Avery bit-player with "one foot in the grave" hobbles up to the bar with (in Joe Adamson's words) "an entire plot of ground, an erected tombstone and a decorative tulip all cumbersomely attached to the end of his right leg."^[7] That kind of gag takes a couple of seconds; Adamson is right to emphasize that what's funny isn't really the gag, after all rather simple-minded if you think about it, but "the brazen vividness of the presentation." The days of Felix were gone; animation's universe had since been enriched with color, sound, copious detail; its inhabitants were no longer inky blobs. Even Mickey Mouse, at one time a

[7] See Joe Adamson, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (1975).

blackness with big white eyeballs and a pair of red shorts, had acquired, by the time of 1937's Brave Little Tailor, a jacket, a belt with a wallet, moreover a loop to carry scissors, all topped by a jaunty feathered hat with a turned-up brim. In so lavishly detailed a universe the mere dotted-line stare would need enhancing, perhaps with trumpets, raised curtains, centered spotlights.

All this craziness, Jones thought it worth emphasizing one morning, was dreamed up and executed by men in hats and ties and vests. "In those days, when you went to work you took off your coat, maybe, but very often you left your vest on. And if you loosened your tie, still you did not take it off." That describes men in uniform, so to speak.

Tex Avery stayed at Warners till Leon Schlesinger fired him in mid-1941 (their dispute was over the final forty feet of a film called The Heckling Hare ), and Chuck Jones animated or helped animate seven Avery pictures, 1936–37. It's arguable that the truly mad and memorable Avery emerged at MGM, 1942–55. To that period belong, for example, the films, notably Little Rural Riding Hood, that feature a lecherous wolf (essentially, the Disney wolf of 1933, but no longer obsessed with just food) and a disarmingly human redheaded nightclub singer. She is animated with the chastest imaginable sexiness,^[8] and he, on first sighting her from his table, invariably finds some eleven different ways to fly madly apart. Sheer libido, you understand, nothing to remark on, the world needs to be kept populated; still, it's hard to forget his eyes popping out two yards on taut strings, or his feet astomp on his head, or his body breaking up into five pieces which by some miraculous law snap back together.

[8] And no rotoscopes were used, Joe Adamson assures us; nor was anyone so much as peeking at live-action footage.

As to what all this has to do with Chuck Jones, who as we've said animated for Avery during just two years, after which he was promoted to Supervisor (i.e., Director) on his own; well, it's perfectly true that Avery's style of boundless exaggeration was never Jones's. What Tex Avery did establish—though for Chuck Jones the lesson took time to stick—was simply the autonomy of the Director's created world. The world of the transcendent Jones cartoons—think of One Froggy Evening or What's Opera, Doc? —has no firm connections with any world outside itself. Humans, such as dicker with talent agents or use their life savings to hire theaters, coexist with a green frog who wears a top hat and sings "Hello, My Baby" and can also walk a tightrope. A pig who sings Wagner soon joins a rabbit who can play a ballerina in drag and can also slide down a white horse with the best of circus stars, in what the rabbit announces has been not opera but send-up ("What did you expect—a happy ending?"). It doesn't seem too much to say that Tex Avery's presence—though none of his major films got made at Warners—underlaid the great period when Warner cartoons, to the general bemusement of Warner brass, paced the cartoon industry, and also fostered Chuck Jones. Jones needed Avery's example. But Tex Avery had to get clear of Warners to flourish, and Jones could not have flourished anywhere else.

For a fix on this complicated theme, consider the role of Walt Disney Enterprises in a world where rival studios, and notably Warners, seemed to have no firm objective save not to be lavish with money. At WDE they came to know what they were after, and it wasn't what Avery was after, nor for that matter what the post-Avery Warners valued. What they

were after chez Disney was the look of expensive perfection. Now define Perfection. (Clearing of executives' throats . . .)

Cartoons were for kids—right? Or so Walt Disney was thinking by about 1935. Thus at Burbank they made Silly Symphonys that would have been far better had they been sillier—a langorous Wynken, Blynken and Nod, for example, as cutey-cute cute as the wooden shoe of a starship they rode through the sky, dangling candy-cane hooks to catch stars. Mothers were meant to recall how their mothers had read Eugene Field's verses to them; were meant also to conclude that their own children would of course love what they themselves seemed to remember loving. Meanwhile the animators gave more and more attention to getting details like the swirl of waves Exactly Right. They'd even check their drawn efforts against live-action footage. When Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Disney's "Nine Old Men," subtitled their big 1981 Disney Animation book "The Illusion of Life," they disclosed more than they perhaps meant to. Somehow, some time a little after the transcendent Three Little Pigs, the perfection Art seeks had been redefined at Disney. Artists were to try for something miscalled Realism, described at one point in the Thomas-Johnston book as "that rich look of a first-class illustration," which hints at, oh, gallery-quality Norman Rockwell.

Warner Bros. animation at its finest had no truck with any such Illusion of Life. But that would be later. At Warner Bros. in the 1930s, Chuck Jones says, Disney's doings were regarded with absolute awe, and by no one more than by Jones himself, who, once he became a director, worked through a long sticky period of Disney-worship. (Obvious how Chouinard training might encourage that. Attach a hand to an arm?

Ah, one more thing I know exactly how to do.) Early in the second half-century since Tom Thumb in Trouble (1940) was, as they say, "released," a viewer of that landmark film is hard put to distinguish admiration from embarrassment. "Supervision" is "by Charles M. Jones"; also credited is one animator, Robert Cannon, the "terrific draftsman" who'd been part of Avery's inheritance at Warners and who clearly had a fine grasp of how to portray the undistorted human form. It's, yes, beautifully drawn; and if you like a nice sentimental story, that's present too, thanks to storyman Rich Hogan (who would soon move to MGM and for years provide Tex Avery with his most Averyesque ideas, dancing redheads, exploding wolves.) But this story? To quote Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald's indispensable Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, "Once upon a time in the dark forest lived a woodchopper and his tiny son, Tom Thumb. Tom is so small that he can take a bath in his dad's cupped hands." A bird (we'll skip some details) saves Tom's life but Dad drives it away. Tom sets forth in a snowstorm to find it. And (quoting again), "Dad awakens and calls for his son. The little bird hears Dad's calls and flies to Tom, bringing him home. Dad, crying over the loss of his son, looks up to see Tom and the bird. That night, Tom is safely asleep in the pillow, the little bird nestled in Dad's beard." Treacle; lachrymose treacle, moreover. But it's all done with exemplary expertise. Astonishing, how the Warner folk could animate a big bearded human with slow but admirable realism, back when other studios (Disney, Fleischer) would prepare to do just that kind of thing by studying live-action footage such as Leon Schlesinger said he lacked the budget for.

Beck and Friedwald provide an interesting coda to their entry on Tom Thumb in Trouble . "Although the Warner car-

toon staff had tried to mimic Disney in the past, by 1940 they had pretty much given up that ambition in favor of the gag approach with which they would soon achieve popular success. This film is a deliberate, last-time effort to figure out the Disney formula. Disney would be used only as a source of satire in the future."

"The gag approach" . . . : That phrase is unnecessarily blank, implying as it does adolescent disrespect for something we haven't the skills or the budget to emulate. And "the Disney formula": that depended, surely, less on Disney animation than on Disney marketing. Walt's narcotics were safe for the kiddies; whereas it's been routinely objected from that day to this that the Warner formula is bad for them, incorporating as it does so much violence . My first afternoon with Chuck Jones, in Baltimore, back in 1974, was punctuated by a woman with a Social Conscience who charged him with promulgating violence, vide those awful "Road Runners." Having heard that, oh, say, 8,053 times, Chuck wasn't deterred. The Coyote, he pointed out, is the only one who gets battered; but never, ever, does the Coyote find himself in a situation he didn't set up, personally and in detail. (Unmollified, Ms. Conscience, a lighter-into, next lit into the hors d'oeuvres.)

We're walking a delicate line. On the one hand, Jones is allegedly the maestro of mindless violence. (Wrong.) On the other hand, he's animation's stickiest sentimentalist. (Also Not Right, though Tex Avery is quoted as saying "That was almost a Jones" about a cartoon of his own he thought was too sentimental.) What Jones did was struggle clear of the treacly Disneyesque. (Feed the Kitty —treacly? No. Though it does offer a moment when audiences have been known to weep.) The great Jones films are neither sentimental nor vio-

lent, though their care for their characters could lead you to think the former while their sheer speed nudges you to the latter. Bully for Bugs —sentimental? Nonsense. Violent? Also nonsense, despite everything its script inflicts on a bull we surely never think is real.

A bull we never think is real—that's a tricky concept. For if we don't think of a bull the cartoon gets trivial, whereas thinking of a beast in pain expels us from the cartoon world. But that is not a beast, therefore not in pain; it's a wondrous arrangement of lines and color and movement. That's something true of all animation, and it's remarkable how much oftener the question comes up chez Jones than, say, chez Avery. Jones differs from Avery in working somewhere close to the mysterious zone where we viewers connect pen-and-ink artifice with the world we inhabit. He'd not claim ownership there, perhaps not even understanding. Still, no other animator seems to have worked in that domain with so much confidence.

In 1942, aged 30, he directed a cartoon which (he says) was "the first Chuck Jones," that is, the first film to bear what could later be recognized as his unmistakable imprint. That was The Dover Boys, a wondrous romp with Tom, Dick and Larry, three jolly chaps enrolled at Pimento University ("Good ole P.U.") and chastely enamored, all three, of the steadfast Dora Standpipe. The date, judging by the one auto we get to see, is ch, about 1910, so Tom, Dick and Larry get around by pedaling (one tandem, one penny-farthing, one trike). How Dora gets around is less clear. Her gown touches the ground and she seems to have no feet, but she's a dynamic wonder as she glides down stairs and wobbles like a bowling pin at each landing. Her resemblance to a bowling

pin doesn't deter a dire fellow named Dan Backslide, who hangs out in pool-halls and, yes, covets chaste Dora. Pool-halls, we know about those; in one wonderful shot our three heroes and Dora glide by such a place on bikes, each averting a horrified gaze. Then—well, you have to see it. There's not a false move, a false moment. Movement is crisp, and stylized in a way that would be seeming normal perhaps twenty years later.^[9] And, weirdest of all the weird details in The Dover Boys, a queer little bald bearded fellow in a swimsuit who has more than once caught our attention by intermittent hops across

[9] In his memoir Talking Animals and Other People (1986), the great animator Shamus Culhane has John Hubley saying (p. 240) that The Dover Boys was a prime inspiration for the UPA cartoons of the 1950s, fabled for their "style."

the bottom of the screen (one-two-three-HOP! ) turns out to be the final winner of Dora Standpipe's heart as he and she hop away into a satisfyingly clichéd sunset. (Jones's Minah Bird, of whom more later, had that Hop mannerism too; and you'll recall Jones recalling a long-ago time when animators could get a laugh just by making a walking figure suddenly Hop. He's a stubborn clinger, is Jones, to what he perceives as validated conventions.)

A strange film, The Dover Boys, a clean break with Disneyfication and perfectly self-contained as few Warner cartoons could think of being back in '42. That contentment in being self-contained is one of its Chuck Jones trademarks. So is its restriction of Animation's whole repertoire to a few formulaic devices. You don't lose when you restrict, no, you gain. That's true of all Art, and a maxim Animation was too long a time validating. Out in Burbank the Disney folk were never sure that there was any limit between what they were doing and utter hang-it-all Realism. (T. S. Eliot, whom they didn't read, had supplied a theme for pondering a decade previously. What had killed off a theater the glory of which was Shakespeare, had been, Eliot postulated, its limitless appetite for Realism.)

Now about the Minah Bird. It first turns up as early as 1939, in a film called Little Lion Hunter . It's still present in several successors, till as late as 1950 (Caveman Inki ). In each film Inki, a little black fellow with a spear, seems to be the only human inhabitant of a jungle so stylized its white hills resemble molars. Armed solely with a spear, he hunts such critters as a parrot, a giraffe, a butterfly. (A spear, for a butterfly! Much isn't adding up.) Through Inki's universe there leaps, occasionally, the Minah Bird. It's black, and intent on nobody knows what, and it has that mannerism of hopping

on every third step, guided by the rhythm of Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave overture. Every time it appears, normal causation is suspended; but if you think it's Inki's good angel you're deceived, since Inki does tend to benefit but never wholly. Thus at the end of Inki and the Minah Bird (1943) the lion is chasing Inki into the sunset, but the Minah Bird has acquired the lion's false teeth, and what danger a toothless lion is likely to be is something on which we may speculate. (That lion, by the way, is a wonder, animated by Shamus Culhane, the same who had marched Disney's Seven Dwarfs singing "Heigh Ho!" Some eight years before Inki, Culhane attended classes taught by the same teacher Jones is proud to credit, Don Graham. And at the zoo to which Graham took the class once a month, Culhane recalls being captivated by "a mangy-looking lion," said to have once been the model for the MGM titles, but by then "the sorriest King of Beasts I ever saw."^[10] Drawings he made there supplied "the best poses" for Inki's lion. And Chuck Jones was especially pleased because a lion's hind legs, for once, got animated correctly.)

Jones claims not to understand his Minah Bird films. He also claims that they drove Walt Disney to distraction. "Make something as funny as that," Walt ordered his staff, and nobody could because nobody could grasp the formula. Nor could Jones, though he made at least five of them. That such strange enigmatic things ever achieved release is a mark of the Schlesinger studio in those days. Perhaps Leon's yacht explains something. "He was a very vulgar, peculiar, naive, lovely man," Jones once recalled, and that cascade of adjectives signals something unusual. "He once bought a yacht

[10] See Talking Animals and Other People, pp. 134 and 246–51.

from Richard Arlen and called it the 'Merrie Melodie,' with a little dinghy on the back that he called 'Looney Tunes.' One day I said, 'Mr. Schlesinger, when are you going to take us out on your yacht?' And he replied, 'I don't want any poor people on my boat.' But, of course, he was the reason we were poor."^[11] And their poverty helps explain what we'd best be grateful for now, Leon's scant attention to their doings on the Terrace.

[11] Steve Schneider, That's All Folks! (1988), p. 38.