CHUCK JONES 1912-2002

The passing yesterday of Chuck Jones, age 89, of congestive heart failure, has lit up animation message boards all around the Internet. Jones was the next-to-last suriving Warner Bros. director of the classic era. (Only Norm McCabe, now in his early 90s, remains.)

Jones started as a cel washer at the Ub Iwerks studio, then gravitated to the Warner Bros. studio in the mid-1930's. Starting as an animator on the picture "The Miller's Daughter", his first shot at the director's chair eluded him in 1937 when, after a joint sojourn making two Porky Pig subcontract jobs with Ub Iwerks, Bob Clampett was promoted to director over Jones. Eventually, with the departures of Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin the next year, Jones did receive his director appointment and began making slow, cute, Silly Symphony-esque pictures, mostly featuring his first creation, Sniffles, a gentle-natured little mouse.

But in the 1940's, Jones had an epiphany. He found that by using a newer, quicker style of animation, he could put humor across in his cartoons, and Jones started making some very funny pictures. "The Dover Boys" was one such early masterwork. By the middle of the decade, Jones found his style and even began recasting Sniffles as a more humorous character. He created a format for the studio's biggest star, Bugs Bunny, in which he and Daffy Duck engaged in three spirited battles against hunter Elmer Fudd. He also developed characters no other director would touch, following the lead of Friz Freleng's "exclusive" characters... these were Pepe LePew and the Road Runner and Coyote.

It was in the 1950's that Jones truly hit pay dirt with a string of extremely creative cartoons. "One Froggy Evening" was perhaps the most talked-about one-shot cartoon ever made, with its parable of the frog who will only sing for the man who unearths him. Then Jones produced "What's Opera, Doc?" setting the Bugs vs. Elmer battle to the music of Wagner on elaborate sets by the great art designer Maurice Noble.

When WB shut its doors in 1963, Jones moved to MGM and made a series of Tom And Jerry cartoons (while lesser hands pretty much trashed the Road Runner), and an Oscar-winning adaptation of Norton Juster's "The Dot And The Line". Jones also produced half-hour TV specials including the much beloved "How The Grinch Stole Christmas".

Jones got his chance with the WB characters again in the 70's through a series of TV specials (the first of which was "Bugs And Daffy's Carnival Of The Animals", adapting the music of Camille Saint-Saens) and a theatrical feature ("The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie"), and pretty much acted as WB's elder statesman for the rest of his life, producing the odd cartoon project with the Looney Tunes gang as recently as the late 1990's as well as marketing a line of original art prints, for sale through authorized dealers as well as his Chuck Jones Showroom in Newport Beach, CA. At the time of his death he was supervising a new series of animations for the Internet.

Jones authored several books including his autobiography, "Chuck Amuck" (1990), and its sequel, "Chuck Reducks" (1996). Jones was married twice, first in 1935 to Dorothy Webster, who died in 1978, and Marian Dern. He leaves a brother, Richard Jones, one daughter, Linda Jones Clough, three grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren.