"I'm a red-hot sportsman after wild game." "Be very, very quiet." "I'm hunting rabbits." " Rabbit season!" " Duck season!" "Hello, young lover." "Who?" "What?" "Where?" "When?" "How?" "Let's get this picture started." "I've been a fan ever since I was born." "It's the kind of comedy that's universal." "I think I enjoy the cartoons more as an adult." "They were smart cartoons with real characters, with real problems and so that is what really captures everybody's interest." "The characters got to do the things we wanted to do, but got punished for." "I like Marvin the Martian." "He's just intriguing." "Capture that creature, and return the illudium PU-36 explosive space modulator." "The alien has stolen the space modulator." "There's a kind of evilness in Daffy that is always, you know, coming to the surface." "The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney." "You're absolutely correct." "And let me remind you again, folks, that you're listening to Truth or..." "I think I just appreciated the bombast just the absolute zany, chaotic you know, approach that Daffy had to the world." "Pepe's one of my favorites simply because he is relentless." "He's what you want your agent to be." "Oh, hello there." "I am so glad you could come." "You have never looked more ravishing." "Do you mind waiting just one minute, golden girl while I slip into something more comfortable?" "You relate to them." "They're flawed, they've got impediments, but they're still outrageous." "Rabbit season!" "Duck season!" "Rabbit season!" "I say it's duck season, and I say fire!" "The amazing thing about Chuck Jones' cartoons are not merely the big gags." "For me, they're the little moments, the little hesitations." "The silence when the character is floating in the air  just before he realizes there's nothing underneath  and then drops." "Probably the greatest influence I've ever had personally is with the work of Chuck Jones." "And I realized through the years  that all of my favorite Warner Brothers cartoons  were directed by this guy Charles M. Jones." "As I became a student of animation, it was his timing." "It was his sense of character and the relationships." "That's where the humor came from." "It wasn't just bang gags." "It was the characters, the comic timing  and the sense of personality." "I was born in 1912 and Gertie the Dinosaur was born in 1914." "That's where it all started." "The amazing thing then was that people were so surprised  that anything could move." "It was magic." "Silent pictures was a great school." "I didn't know I was being schooled, but I had learned all these things." "When we were living on Sunset Boulevard  just two blocks away from the Chaplin Studio  that's where we'd watch him." "If it was good enough for Chaplin or Keaton it was good enough for me." "I didn't even think that I was copying him." "You're crazy if you don't learn from others." "The reason I got into drawing was because I had the right parents." "My mother had felt that children could do no wrong." "She would never criticize a child's drawing and that was the most important thing of all." "Then we had a father who was always going into new businesses  and he was always failing in them, and he always ended up  with a lot of letterheads that nobody could use  except us, to draw on the back of." "He said, "You never know when you'll get a drawing worth keeping."" "Chuck's talent was beginning to show at a very early age." "He was really quite a good draftsman as a youngster." "We did move around a lot." "The way we moved was my father would look around  until he'd rented a house that had books in it." "Not just books, but good books." "Full sets of Mark Twain, full sets of Dickens." "Baudelaire, O. Henry, de Maupassant." "And we read every single one of those, all of us and we ended up with a pretty good knowledge of world literature." "Eight and eight is sixteen." "I hated school." "I was miles ahead, as it turned out, of most kids my age." "And these people were wallowing around in these platitudes." "Four and four is eight." "Well, Mr. Phillips, daydreaming again?" "The great good luck that I had was my father realized that I was so bloody unhappy in high school that he took me out of high school and put me in Chouinard Art Institute." "Chuck graduated from the Chouinard Art School I think it was in 1930, and then he drew portraits for a couple of years when he was at a place called Olvera Street which was a tourist trap." "I don't know how I got the idea that I could draw a portrait that was worth a dollar, but we did." "I discovered that it didn't matter what they looked like." "You can make them look pretty in profile  because they've never seen their own profiles." "So by doing that, they go away happy, and I get my dollar." "Every time you make a caricature, you lose a friend." "I didn't know I would be an animator." "Even when I went to art school, I didn't know what I was aiming for  because I knew that they made these pictures but I didn't know how." "So rather than being an artist, as the guys from New York called it  I became a cel washer." "In those days, the cels were actually made of celluloid and they cost seven cents a piece." "I remember that clearly." "There were these things called cels." "They not only used them to make animation they reused them to save money during the Depression." "It was cheaper to hire somebody for $15 a week to wash cels than it was to buy a new set of them." "Having worked his way up literally, and he worked for Ub Iwerks and he worked for all sorts of people in the profession  he worked his way up to animator  and he was now animating for really good directors  Friz Freleng, Tex Avery." "Everybody had their own individual styles." "Then he was learning what to do, what not to do." "The Warner Brothers animation department  which for a long time was Leon Schlesinger Productions  wasn't officially part of Warner Brothers did not exist on the Warner Brothers Studio lot in Burbank." "It was sort of an annex of the original Warner Brothers property on Sunset Boulevard." "And the area that was assigned to the animation department was dubbed by its denizens "termite terrace."" "Apparently, not without cause." "It was kind of a ratty old building." "It was falling apart." "But it was the kind of environment where great things come out." "When Chuck first started out, his cartoons were, I think  considered aggressively cute." "He did a lot of very round, soft, Sniffles the Mouse cartoons." "There's a very pronounced Disney influence in those years." "He was kind of doing Disney-type things with a lower budget." "A robin!" "But it wasn't that dynamic kind of thing he did later." "It's sure nice and dark all right." "I was criticized, because they said I was imitating Disney." "It seemed to me quite natural to learn how  they would do these things like they did  and to make them believable." "But I didn't know what else to do but to study the people that had come before me." "Disney had established a fortress of very sincere storytelling which, just by its nature is calling for somebody else to come along and do something with an edge to it, or a bite to it." "What it was that caused him to absorb more of the Warners wackiness over that 4 to 5-year period, that transitional period from his first films to his first great films, I don't know." "I remember reading about Chuck, saying that he had directed The Draft Horse during this period." "It was a great cartoon first of all, tour de force animation by Ken Harris of this horse attempting to be drafted to show his patriotism to the army sergeant." "Oh, boy." "I'm going to be a soldier." "I'm going to fight the enemy." "I'll annihilate them." "I'll wipe them out." "That's what I'll do." "I'll get them." "So Draft Horse..." "It isn't comfortable for a horse to assume those positions  and it's the first time Chuck realized  when he saw it with an audience, that he could actually get laughs." "They got me." "Mother." "And I think that turned the corner for him." "I think he said, "Hey, I kind of like this." ""This is kind of fun seeing an audience..." ""...actually respond in a very vocal way to my work."" "Part of Chuck's coming of age at Warner Brothers as a director was experimenting with the look of the films the actual design of the films." "Those backgrounds were abstract." "And they became believable because of the way the characters moved within them." "And in The Aristo-Cat, the first time I realized  through the good offices of the layout man  how you can show the characters almost losing their mind  by what the backgrounds were." "Meadows!" "And by using that he can show the degeneration of the character's mind." "And it was very effective." "You really felt that." "There was one picture, I remember, that Chuck did  which really was so different, such a stylized picture." "The layout and background men were John McGrew and Gene Fleury." "One of Chuck's early masterpieces was The Dover Boys where he really learned about clarity of timing and clarity of posing." "I was fortunate enough to have worked on that one." "We used to read The Rover Boys, Tom, Dick, and Larry." "And I got so fascinated by the ridiculousness of it." "But I noticed that every time in the book whenever they mentioned the Rover Boys, they'd say:" ""The Rover Boys are Tom, Dick, and Larry..." ""...and their archenemy Dan Backslide."" "The former sneak of Roquefort Hall, coward, bully, cad, and thief  and archenemy of the Dover Boys, squanders his misspent life." "Hark." "The Dover Boys!" "Drat them!" "And every time they mentioned this guy in the book, they would say:" ""Dan Backslide, coward, bully, cad, and thief..." ""...and archenemy of the Rover Boys," so you wouldn't forget." "It seemed so ridiculous." "The more they said it, the funnier it sounded to me." "So that's why I put it in." "I'm very much at home with villains." "A runabout." "I'll steal it." "No one will ever know." "You want that feeling of suddenness, and then stop." "Help!" "Help!" "And the way that he would make the timing crisp is that he would go from one pose over here to another pose over here with what animators call "smear drawings."" "So that he would take about three frames where he would establish one pose here, one pose there and then smear all the way between both poses at once  and then fold up into the final drawing." "It was an unbelievable thing." "It was one of the first uses  of what people now call "limited animation."" "Although, I prefer to think of it as "stylized animation" rather than "limited animation" because the animation is still great." "It's just pushing a pose for all of its value." "Help!" "Management didn't know anything about cartoons." "They didn't know humor." "They didn't know creation." "All they wanted to do was make money." "Every so often, something would sneak through like The Dover Boys." "When he did Dover Boys, he caught hell from the front office." "They didn't want limited animation, although it was great." "I got fired a number of times but that didn't seem to take." "I don't know." "I didn't know I was fired, so I'd stick around." "Chuck often worked with characters who'd been originated by others and he put his stamp on Bugs Bunny  as much as anybody did, but he didn't originate him." "And that goes for Daffy and Porky and all those guys  but the Road Runner and the coyote were entirely Chuck's  as were Pepe le Pew and some of the later characters." "If you think of Bugs and Daffy and Porky as characters who are like actors who work for different directors depending on who's directing you'll see that they have different personas depending on who's directing." "But when Chuck is directing, somehow the characters have extra depth." "Chuck directed a picture called Presto Change-O with that rabbit  that didn't have a name yet." "And in that picture, he didn't even speak." "In fact, in several of Chuck's pictures, there was no dialogue." "I think that was the charming part." "And I loved that movie." "They always screened the pictures for us." "And we always had to write a critique." "I remember saying I really thought that that was a great cartoon and that, that rabbit really should be..." "They should have him in more pictures, which they did eventually  and he evolved into Bugs Bunny, as you probably know." "What's up, Doc?" "There's a rabbit down there, and I'm trying to catch him." "Tex Avery did a wild hare and that's when the rabbit says, "What's up, Doc?"" "And that just seemed to seal his fate." "When Tex Avery did Bugs  and did him very beautifully in his own way, he was just crazy, nuts." "He was one of the great directors." "And what he did, he approached it in quite a different way." "Going up!" "What I had to find out was, if I was Bugs Bunny, how would I act?" "How he resembled me." "Ok, everybody out." "Main floor." "When Bugs Bunny came along in the '40s, he really developed in the '40s he was sort of the anti-Mickey Mouse because he was everything Mickey Mouse wasn't." "Irreverent, a wise guy." "Not middle-American at all, but New Yorkese." "And he had a pugnacious nature  that was perfectly suited, as it turns out, to the times." "Look, Doc, do I go around nailing signs over your house?" "Do I?" "There's still such a thing as private property, you know." "Did you ever hear of the inalienable right of the sanctity of the home?" "Bugs Bunny is not just an insane rabbit." "Somebody's always trying to get him, and he's retaliating." "He's getting revenge." "We can all relate to that." "I know working in Hollywood, I can." "Music-hater." "It was that kind of stubbornness that sometimes gave us a pretty good idea of what Bugs Bunny was all about." "That he wanted to complete the thing that he was trying to do  and there was an impediment." "In this case, it was Giovanni Jones." "Having been provoked, then he engages cheerfully into the battle." "Of course, you know this means war." "Then he says, "Of course, you realize this means war."" "And that was such a useful thing." "It came from the Marx Brothers." "They used it." "But I thought:" ""Well, at least I'm stealing from a great source."" "Bugs could play any part." "Bugs Bunny, the super rabbit, the rabbit of tomorrow." "But another thing you have to add to him is the playfulness." "And you're so big and so strong." "Why, poor, helpless, little me was just lost till you..." "Think nothing of it, missy." "It was a pleasure, I assure you." "The idea of Bugs playing the femme always kind of made me laugh." "Oh, how simply dreadful!" "And he knows that Elmer is a patsy for girls, so he uses that." " Did I hurt you with my naughty gun?" " Aw, shucks." "Well, I..." "I think Chuck's take on Bugs Bunny is he's a winner." "Daffy Duck is a loser." "Disney did Donald, and Donald had polite humor and Daffy was vaudevillian humor." "Daffy was basically pie-in-the-face, total slapstick." "The story always with Daffy is to put him in a situation  if Bugs were there, he'd be triumphant  but if Daffy's doing it, you know he's going to screw up." "Seems awfully breezy in here." "Cease that rustling." "Slight pause whilst I adjust my accoutrements." "He believes that everybody's out to do him in which is a perfectly legitimate supposition." "They are out there to do him in." "He's relentless, because he just won't stop." "Yoicks and away!" "And there's something of the little kid in that." "Yoicks and away!" "And I understood Daffy, because I was Daffy." "And I am Daffy." "I said, "I can dream about being Bugs Bunny..." ""...but when I wake up, I'm Daffy." I guess there's no two ways about that." "You know, doing the unexpected is a lot of what makes these cartoons work." "A close-up." "This is a close-up?" "A close-up, you jerk!" "A close-up!" "It's turning the formula inside out as he does  so completely in Duck Amuck." "That picture is a wonderful example of personality being worked to the nth degree with one character." "Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon and that in animated cartoons, they have scenery." "And in all the years I..." "All right, wise guy, where am I?" "And it was such a great concept, this unseen animator you know, basically torturing Daffy Duck." "It was the inappropriate quality of everything that made him pay off so well." "I used that a lot, conditions in which people find themselves in a proper attitude, but in the wrong place." "Well?" "Where's the rest of me?" "It isn't as though I haven't lived up to my contract, goodness knows." "Goodness knows, it isn't as though I haven't kept myself trim." "I've done that." "That's strange." "All of the sudden, I don't quite feel like myself." "I feel all right, and yet I..." "I..." "You know better than that." "Well?" "It really played with the conventions of animated cartoon making." "Who is responsible for this?" "I demand that you show yourself!" "Who are you?" "Ain't I a stinker?" "There's a wonderful series he did with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig." "They were kind of parodies of lots of different either TV shows or film genres." "Are you ready, eager young space cadet?" "I'm all set, your heroship, sir." "Then make way for Duck Dodgers in the 241/2th century!" "Had the silly thing in reverse." "And I think that was one of the first big plays with the Martian." "Got the drop on you with my disintegrating pistol." "And, brother, when it disintegrates, it disintegrates." "Well, what do you know?" "It disintegrated." "Happy birthday, you thing from another world, you." "Oh, thank you." "I wouldn't be surprised if you get George Lucas to admit  that the entire costume design for Darth Vader came from the Martian." "Lucas admits that." "I would've liked to have seen Marvin the Martian as Darth Vader." ""I'm your father." "Luke, use the force." ""If not, this Acme discombobulater ray."" "There's Duck Dodgers." "But I loved Rocket Squad, which is so great." "It's like a Dragnet in space with those two guys." "This is the Milky Way, a nice galaxy." "875 billion trillion people live here." "Yes, it's a nice place to live." "It's my job to keep it that way." "I'm a space cop." "My name's Monday." "My partner's name is Tuesday." "He always follows me." "It was Wednesday, January 23, 10:26 p.m." "It's 10:28 p.m." "Like I said, it was 10:28 p.m." "The genre parodies give you a big leg up." "You can just worry about the content." "The form is kind of set." "Joe, come right over, please." "I need your help immediately." "Right." "My interview with the chief was brief and to the point." "He wanted me to find out who the flying-saucer bandit was  and then to place him under arrest." "I consented." "Since the audience knows the reference points he can move much faster, and he can be..." "He can just concentrate on being funny, which he does brilliantly." "By the time I was about six years old, all we saw were silent pictures  and very flamboyant action." "You ain't got a chance." "I'm the hero of this picture and you know what happens to the villain." "So what's to know?" "I grew up with Douglas Fairbanks, and I wanted to be that kind of a dashing hero." "And then when I got to Daffy Duck why, he was not the right person to be that grand." "You look at Pepe le Pew." "This character and how he walks through life with such optimism, you know?" "Yet, he stinks." "Just to think, radiant flower, you do not have to come with me to the casbah." "We are already here." "Pepe was relatively simple to me  being one of the few characters  I could completely associate with." "...preliminaries..." "I wasn't a very attractive young man." "I didn't think I was  which is the same thing." "...making love..." "So Pepe came quite naturally to me  and he was a person who had no doubt about his own sexuality." "This small coquette, she thinks by running away she can make herself more attractive to me." "How right she is." "Chuck loves to talk about being ignored in high school by girls probably because he was younger than they were  and Pepe's endless pursuit and self-confidence  which Chuck, of course, did not feel." "The one in the middle may remain." "The rest of you, another day." "Pepe's just..." "He's just a horny skunk." "If Pepe ever gets pursued very much  he runs in the other direction." "Madame, control yourself." "Your conduct is unseemly." "Control yourself." "Madame!" "Why is it that whenever a man is captured by a woman all he wishes to do is get away?" "All the girls like Pepe le Pew." "Chuck did a series of cartoons with Hubie and Bertie  these two characters that I love." " Hey, Bert, come here." " Yeah, yeah, Hubie, what is it?" "What is it?" "What is it?" "Welcome to our new home." "Nice, huh?" "Yeah, yeah." "Sure, sure." "And one of them is very bright, and the other one is not." "And the bright guy sees a way of getting rid of the cat but the other guy is tickled by it." "Let's see now." "This is going to require stragety." "The thing we got to do is we got to get that cat out of the house." "Now, here's what you should do, Bert." "I needed a cat who would be bedeviled by these two mice who were trying to get him to leave the house." "That's the whole story." "So I invented Claude." "Claude Cat." "The Simpsons has always been given credit for showing the American dysfunctional family but you look at those three bears  with Junyer and Henry and that poor hapless wife that's the American dysfunctional family predating The Simpsons by 30 or 40 years." "Once upon a time, in the deep woods, there lived three bears." "Papa Bear, Mama Bear  and Baby Bear." "Eat your oatmeal!" "What did I do?" "What did I do?" "Stan was wonderful." "He came to work for me when I needed the baby bear." "And he was 18 years old." "I played the Junyer Bear that talked like that." "I remember one line." "On Father's Day, they drove this father bear crazy." "Presenting a Father's Day poem, Henry." "My Pa, by Junyer Bear, age seven and a half." ""When my poor little pinafore's all wet with tears" ""Who says" ""'There, there, little man" ""'Everything is all right'?" ""My pa"" "Well, I don't want breakfast in bed!" "I hate breakfast in bed!" "Father's Day, Henry." "On her sixth birthday when Linda, my daughter, decided she was old enough to prepare my breakfast she knew what I liked, which is French toast and bacon and stuff and so she wanted to serve it to me in bed." "It was much like that, a grump." "He'd say, "I hate breakfast in bed." "Why do I have to have breakfast in bed?"" "And my mother would say, "Because it's Father's Day, dear."" "And then he would say, "All right, I'll have breakfast in bed then."" "Breakfast in bed for Pa." "I am doing a good thing on Father's Day." "Good old breakfast for good old Dad on good old Father's Day." "The cosmic significance of the Road Runner chase is something that, you know, is pretty much inescapable." "The reason you're watching the cartoon is  because he'll never catch the Road Runner." "There's no way." "He's fated to never do it." "The repetition and the variations of changes on the situation are unique, I think, in the annals of filmmaking." "Mike Maltese and I were trying to do something which would be a parody." "Why was everybody chasing everybody else?" "Sometimes I feel very sorry for the coyote." "Sometimes I wish he'd catch him." "If he caught him, there wouldn't be any more Road Runner." "You wouldn't like that, would you?" "No." "I mean, a 3-year-old can relate to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote." "I mean, you can identify with that hunger that need to get the meal." "You know?" "And yet, you want to be able to run away from the monsters who are chasing you." "The coyote could only be victimized by his own ineptitudes  and his trust in the Acme Corporation." "Practically every product that the coyote orders or, you know that a Warner Brothers character uses is from the Acme Company." "The products themselves are anything but the acme of their manufacturer." "Usually they backfired completely." "All comedy is based on error or mistakes." "Who was it?" "Mark Twain said something about stepping on a banana peel." "It's very funny if it happens to somebody else but if it happens to you, it's not funny." "The wonderful thing about animation is that you can choose to do whatever you want." "You don't have to follow the conventions of real life." "So when the coyote's going to start running there's a lot of ways you could have him start to run to build up a head of speed." "He could spring into action, could be catapulted almost." "His legs can start rotating and building up speed  and starting to kick up dust." "The feet go first  and then he has to sort of move the rest of his torso to get in sync with the bottom part of his anatomy." "In the Chuck Jones tradition, that happens all the time." "People are constantly being flattened  and then they pop up into three dimensions again." "When you see a Chuck Jones character in the beginning of a film you know that, that person or animal won't stay in that shape for six minutes." "They will be going through a lot of different kinds  of physical manifestations." "And I think it's that kind of respect for gravity respect for Isaac Newton, that really makes them even funnier." "The idea of looking up and waving, if you had time, you'd do it." "Give yourself dignity at least." "A live-action director sets up a scene, shoots it and tries to get the right energy, the right rhythm into the scene and into the performances and then, in the editing room, refines that and may use cutaways of some of the other actors or tighten up some of the spaces between moments of dialogue and then that's it." "The animation director has to do all that beforehand." "In Chuck's cartoons, there's an awareness of the camera that a lot of directors don't have." "Oftentimes in our work, we're so inspired by the camera angles not in live action, but in Chuck's work." "And what amazes me  is all those camera angles weren't found by looking around the set." "They were drawn." "And so often, his camera angles  are a major part of the gag." "The impact of the cuts and the choices, they're not just functional." "They're really effective." "It's like what I think a lot of directors do today." "We do storyboards." "We do our live action movies in cartoon form." "In the old days, they didn't write a script." "They would draw the gags and do the dialogue  like a cartoon strip that you would see in the funny paper." "If you can imagine a Sunday comic strip with 140 sketches." "We stuck up anything at random." "Just any idea, maybe an expression, anything." "Then as they had some relationship from one another they'd be brought together." "Tedd Pierce was a story man." "He did lots of stories for Chuck." "Then later, Mike Maltese worked with Chuck." "And Chuck had a great rapport with Mike." "I bet if you took the same storyboard with all the same gags in it and even the same audio track and gave it to two directors Chuck being one and someone else being the other Chuck's would always be funnier." "Because he understood what makes a gag work." "I wonder if the public really knows the part that a good director plays in animation." "It's not the job of the animator to create the situation  and to create the characters, and to create the timing." "It's the director who does it every step of the way." "He does the extreme drawings." "He does the points of contact." "An animation director at least in the classic style of animation directors would actually draw the key poses, or what are sometimes called "extremes" for every shot, every character." "Chuck would do that drawing." "Maybe not a finished drawing but a drawing that would capture the attitude that's the key word that they all use "attitude" of the character at that moment." "When Chuck directs a cartoon he does an awful lot of layout pose drawings for the animator." "In fact, his pose drawings actually come before the background layouts." "He'll kind of establish the space the characters are working in  and their attitudes  and then they'll kind of work the background layouts around that  so he can have the freedom to express through the characters  the way that he wants." "And he will make a lot of drawings  really indicating one character's thought processes  all the way through the entire cartoon." "Now, this is really what animators use as a road map." "It doesn't mean that the scene is preanimated." "It means, rather, that these are the succinct points  that the animators need to hit to get this particular expression across." "But animators, being great animators like Ken Harris or Ben Washam  can take that, and it gives them one boost up." "That gives them the clear road that they're traveling  and then they turn it into animation magic." "The approach that Chuck Jones took, which was to storyboard and plan everything out with his layouts and give it to the animators to follow to the T." "The timing, everything that he had was there." "The table was set." "Guard!" "Turn!" "Parry!" "Dodge!" "Spin!" "Thrust!" "He approaches his films that way." "Everything is planned to the nth degree." "And there's a real personal stamp  on a film when a director approaches it that way." "The individual person of that director is seen through nearly every frame." "Chuck would call all us animators and crew in  and he'd go through it." "He knew which animator could do which the best." "And I would stand in the background and listen to the whole story." "And then Chuck would bring the whole picture in to me and I'd quickly go through and make rough sketches of every single scene and extreme, very quick red sketches." "I knew where all the action was." "Awfully unsporting of me, I know, but what the hey?" "I got to have some fun." "The characters are flat designed characters." "They're satire." "They're fun to look at." "So, consequently, I thought the backgrounds should fit in with that." "There'd be designed element, fun elements." "But there's a very fine line between design and rapport with your audience." "In other words, you could have a very designed element  and lose your audience." "So all my design is based on supporting the character  in the action that they're being involved with." "When he does something like Duck Dodgers in the 241/2th Century..." "There, when I got the storyboard I would go over it with Maurice at the same time." "And I'd tell him, "Do anything, but don't interfere with the action."" "And he understood that." "I looked at his storyboard, then I started to cook up a lot of crazy ideas like the evaporator and a lot of that stuff." "The idea of going to the airport by dissolving, bloop, he disappears." "Then you cut to the airport, bloop, and he appears." "I thought that was wonderful." "It didn't require anything from the animator but it required a great deal from the layout man." "And when Daffy walks into the scene, he put that big eye up there  which put it in the future." "Those are things that Maurice added." "They were not part of the original story sketches." "And this is the essence of what animation design is all about." "Look at those backgrounds." "They're fantastic." "The backgrounds in the classic Road Runner cartoons, great!" "You really want to be there." "That Road Runner country." "This is all, in essence, the Grand Canyon." "Monument Valley, the Painted Desert." "These are all colors that have come from those areas." "We were out in space, and I fooled around trying to find some designs." "I came up with this red runway and the glass and all this and that." "Just a matter of flight of imagination, but it seemed to work." "You design for the action, and incidentally the star of the whole show is the animation." "The background, the layout man, is a supporter." "Chuck has often said that the difference between a laugh and no laugh can be as little as one frame." "Okay, Pa." "I will do good this time." "The timing of Chuck Jones is remarkable." "In this one Three Bears cartoon, they somehow catapult the father bear  up into the air  and they look up in the sky, and he doesn't come down." "And so they join hands and walk into the house." "How long should they walk into the house?" "How long should it be nighttime before the sun comes up and you hear a rooster crow in the morning?" "That sense of timing that Chuck brings to his animation is he keeps holding the audience back for as long as possible." "Everybody knows what'll happen but he doesn't deliver it until the last minute." "I always think of it as like playing cards." "You've got your ace there, and you know it's coming  and you want to hang onto it for as long as possible  before you put it down, for dramatic effect." "Speaking of that, where they thread the rope all over the house  what worked very well for me  was when he pushes the big boulder off of there." "I want the audience to enjoy that half a second or maybe two seconds, to know what's going to happen to the cat." "That's a delicious moment." "I timed the action, pared it down where needed." "At that point, only at that point, would I call in Mel Blanc." "We would go through it, and I would be Bugs Bunny all the way through and then reverse it, and he would be Daffy so they'd be recording both of our voices." "It's true, Doc." "I'm a rabbit, all right." "Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?" "Shoot him now!" "Shoot him now!" ""Shoot him now!" "Shoot him now!"" ""He doesn't have to shoot you now." "I say he does have to shoot me now."" "And those quick changes, that really was pronoun trouble." "The director had to know the exact intonation of their every line." " Let's run through that again." " Okay." "This is a very calm thing here." ""Do you want to shoot him now or wait till you get home?"" "Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?" "Shoot him now." "Shoot him now." "You keep out of this." "He doesn't have to shoot you now." "That's it!" "Hold it right there!" "Pronoun trouble." "To me, the reading of each sentence must be thought out very carefully." "Oh, no, you don't." "Not this time." "Wait till you get home." "All right." "Mel was so good that the whole thing would probably take less than an hour  because we all understood it as it went along  and he was so quick a reader." "He was the most ideal actor I'd ever worked with." "Chuck knew what he wanted." "He was precise in his directions and fortunately he hired the right actors." "I have a warm spot for Witch Hazel." "Chuck was the one who really made it famous." "Darling!" "She was sort of an overweight Zsa Zsa Gabor." "Come in!" "Come in!" "She would look in the mirror and say:" ""Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the ugliest one of all?"" "And when she was reassured that she was the ugliest she was so happy." "I'm so deathly afraid of getting pretty as I grow older." "Pretty?" "She was a damn good actress, the same with Mel." "The animator is an actor, but he acts on the direction of the director." "He does what the director tells him and he draws as the director wants him to draw." "Chuck had wonderful animators." "He had Benny Washam, who was a great animator and Lloyd Vaughan and Ken Harris." "Ken Harris was just great." "All these guys were tremendous animators." "Even so, Chuck's personality came through." "The animator would draw the first and maybe the sixth and the eighth drawing." "And then the in-betweeners would go in-between each drawing." "I warn you, dearie I'm going to worm all of your ugly secrets out of you." "Tell me now, who undoes your hair?" "You don't get great animators and when you get them, you want to nurture, hold, and help them." "Ken Harris had the ability to get action into things." "Indeed, we wanted our characters to be alive." "And that's the essence of everything to do with animation, isn't it?" "I mean, the term itself, "to invoke life," I took very seriously." "If they weren't alive, how the hell could I care about them?" "I discovered it isn't a question of drawing." "It's a question of expression that makes any character come to life." "Chuck's facial expressions were the best in the business because he was a minimalist." "We're so used to eyes as the one fixture on our body that is really always alive." "When you have eyes moving, it brings life to the character." "The rest of it could be dead." "The move of the eye sometimes is one where you..." "Something's happening and you suddenly go, "What?"" "The little eye flick, you'll catch it every time  because you learn more from eyes moving  than you do really from the mouth moving even." "A lot of people think that classic cartoon animation is broad." "Just everything you do is broad." "In actual fact, if you look at a Chuck Jones cartoon it's not broad, it's rather subtle." "The distinction is that if he wants a particular facial expression  to read in a very sharp way  the transitions themselves will be very, very fast." "I love Feed the Kitty, because it's a great cartoon that is hysterically funny, but also very warm." "You actually feel something for this relationship that this big thug of a bulldog has for this teeny little cute kitten." "Now what are you up to?" "You look very guilty." "The expressions on his face when he's trying to hide the kitten from his mistress are absolutely priceless." "Especially where he does a little, "Who, me?"" "I did 53 drawings before I got it right." "The little kitty falls into the mixing bowl  and the dog thinks he's been baked into a cookie." "Marc Anthony, you greedy thing!" "He watches through the window as the housewife puts what he thinks is the cat  in the oven to cook." "He's absolutely distraught when it looks like the kitten's been baked in a batch of cookies." "All right, Marc Anthony, I think you've been punished enough." "My, what a long face." "Well, I know just the thing for that." "Here." "Well, come on." "Come on, take it." "I thought it was a laugh, but people in the audience cried a little." "I never planned that." "I've seen people choke while watching this cartoon." "And yet it manages to be poignant and funny and very dark all at the same time." "I will now play a passage from a famous opera and you must name the opera." "But I'm weary." "Listen carefully." "And there you have it." "Now, what's the opera?" "Cavalleria Rusticana?" "Audience?" "Rigoletto!" "My story is probably not unique in that I came to classical music through the work of Chuck Jones." "The main reason for using that kind of music is that it's the best music." "It's the most appropriate, even for an animated cartoon." "Hi-ho, Tinfoil, away!" "The William Tell overture may be a cornball to us now but it works." "It works." "He was using these great works of classical music to express these ideas with so much humor." "The man who did most of the music for those cartoons was a man called Carl Stalling." "Now, he's not a household word, but, boy, was he good." "You'd never know that he had a wonderful sense of humor." "He looked like a streetcar conductor." "I couldn't figure out where he got that." "He could do very funny things with music." "Leopold!" "One of my favorite moments is when Bugs Bunny dons the wig  as Leopold Stokowski and conducts  the tenor through his aria." "Speaking of poses and getting a lot out of a very little the poses and gestures that Bugs goes through to control and manipulate the performance is brilliant." "Even the insane conducting gestures that he has him make of course they're funny, but they're not that far off." "That's what's so vicious and so wonderfully funny." "I had to learn piano score to this extent that I could see if the notes went up they would get higher, then they came down." "Then I discovered how you broke up some of the stuff." "What came to my attention, was that one time I noticed that a quarter note  below the staff had that little line through it  and it looked like a little man with a derby hat on." "The whole thing came from that one thought." "The Blue Danube piece that Chuck created  where you have a set of notes that set up themselves  and become The Blue Danube except for one note." "You know, taking G clefs and molding them and doing all this stuff." "You'll notice we didn't put anything that didn't belong in there." "That's the fun of it." "If you're dealing with a hunk of music notes  you have to be honest with yourself and with them." "And the more you narrow it, the better it gets." "Everything in there was honest, too." "Every device we used in there, you'd find on a staff of music." "If I'd known music, I probably would have leaned on things that I knew and how to employ it." "Fortunately, I didn't know how to employ it so the way I employed it gave it a kind of novelty, I think that might not have occurred otherwise." "With the Rabbit of Seville  the music worked, but it wasn't about the music." "It was about Elmer's trying to kill a rabbit." "The marriage of the music itself and the drawing  came together, both of us unexplored." "The music didn't know it would be an animation  and I didn't know anything about music." "I don't know how many of us have grown up thinking that Rossini came complete with lyrics that went:" ""Welcome to my shop Let me cut your mop" ""Daintily, daintily"" "I got to know that piece of music and that opera because of that cartoon." "I don't know how many people of my generation that happened to." "Rabbit of Seville is marvelous mainly for me because of its precision." "I think people don't realize that comedy has to be really, really precise  in order to work." "And when you're conceiving and timing something to music so well  that's the difference between making people laugh  and making people enjoy it and not." "It's much funnier to me  to see people doing funny things in front of great music  than it is to have a caricature of music." "The music was written this way  and you're trying to do something with it." "You can't change the timing of it." "What interested you in it was the way it was written." "And the hesitates and everything are in there." "Once you start, and you've sacrificed yourself  on that particular cross  then you'll have to accept the idea that that's what you're working with." "The music is there." "Now you bring in another factor:" "Drawing." "A simple drawing." "In the scene where Bugs has the hair tonic and puts it on Elmer's head and the flowers grow out and it's done to the music so impeccably." "And the chase." "And then it leads up to the battle of the bigger and bigger weapons." "It's just the escalation done to the music  that just makes that so hilarious and so funny." "Of course, it turned generations of people off opera." "Probably no more than the Marx Brothers did." "I think it was a very easy straight line because opera has great beauty and..." "Although it's mostly Wagner..." "It's mostly the German operas they go after." "You know, opera singers don't have a posse." "You never see Wagner's guys going after him like:" ""Yo, Wagner rules." "Keeping out representing Wagner right now." ""Ring cycle, Nibelungen." "Keeping it real." ""I want to thank Wagner for putting it out."" "Mark Twain said Wagner's music was better than it sounded  and he said he liked Parsifal, except for the singing." "I've never met anyone who can sit through the entire ring of Nibelungen  and come out singing  or even alive, for that matter." "I mean, come on, the white horse coming down  and sitting down and all that fat bulges out." "I mean, that is just hugely funny  but everything looks so beautiful." "The thing I love about Chuck Jones' work  is how he incorporated exquisite design  into these cartoons, into the storytelling into the timing, into the humor." "That's one of the amazing things about What's Opera, Doc?" "The other directors tended to play it safe." "They had one product and would go with it." "They'd do it over and over and over again." "But not Chuck." "He was always straining to do something new and different." "In other words, he gave me tremendous leeway." "We had a previous designer that wanted to have  the proscenium arch right on stage all the time." "I said, "To hell with that," you know?" "I wanted to have super-grand opera." "We threw away the arch completely  and immediately started writing on a grand scale." "The long shot, the big shadow and all that, Chuck worked it back into the picture." "It was kind of back and forth all the way through that." "Sometimes he'd suggest bits of action  and sometimes I could suggest a setup for some scene." "I predesigned color sketches." "Take them in and say:" ""Chuck, maybe the picture can go this way. "" "He'd say, "What are you bothering me for?" ""I'm busy doing my animation layouts." ""You go do the backgrounds."" "I believe that on the average Warner Brothers cartoon there's probably 60-something shots in the cartoon." "That one was 110 or something like that." "I don't know the exact numbers, but it was so much bigger than anything  that had been done before." "Yet he made it work so well." "And the design in that is so exquisite." "It really took the Warner Brothers cartoon up to a whole other level." "Animation, I suppose, as an art form, is very much like ballet." "Chuck's work particularly made use of that." "Choreographing each movement and each expression  to a prerecorded soundtrack  gave it all just sort of a perfect symmetry." "The music was right." "It's what they did in front of it that made it funny we hoped." "The main thing was Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny  addressing Wagner head on." "We took the 14 hours of the Nibelungen and squashed it down to six minutes." "I'll kill them." "Where are they?" "Awise, storm." "Maurice probably told you the problems he had with the colors." "They didn't like the idea of Elmer being lavender and purple  and different colors because he'd never been done that way." "Fortunately, all of our battles then were never gigantic." "They were always minuscule." "But they were absolutely defined by the need for the picture." "When Elmer says, "I killed a rabbit," the audience goes quiet." "They're right with you." ""Poor little rabbit." "I killed a rabbit."" "From all this exciting color, and this somberness..." "Well, what did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?" "When the glory days of Bugs Bunny were over for him, it didn't stop him." "He took a lot of chances and did a lot of experimenting." "Some of it worked, like The Grinch and The Dot and the Line which is a wonderful cartoon, when he went to MGM." "Other things didn't work." "For instance, he took over Tom and Jerry." "Chuck tried to give them a slightly different look  a slightly different take." "I think that people wanted to see Tom and Jerry  exactly as they'd seen it." "They didn't want any kind of changes, and so to the extent Chuck made changes it may have bothered people." "If you looked at all of Chuck Jones' cartoons in chronological order he really was almost predicting design styles." "It's interesting when you're talking about a film like High Note or The Dot and the Line because those represent departures for Chuck although he was trying to do that, I think, through his career." "Trying to find those unique stories to tell." "The little book, if you've ever seen it, it's very clever." "So we took that book and expanded it." "To translate from book form  you have to do a lot of thinking and planning . and maneuvering around to make it work." "It was very successful." "It got the Academy Award." "Once upon a time, there was a sensible straight line  who was hopelessly in love  with a dot." "I don't want something that's realistic, I want something that's believable." "And in The Dot and the Line, for instance, you can make a believable character out of something that's a straight line." "The frivolous dot wasn't a bit interested  for she only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle  who never seemed to have anything on his mind at all." "He wanted to go for something that was different." "It was so different than anything he'd done at Warner Brothers." "It was avant-garde for its day, for God's sake." "He saw the potential in a totally abstract film to do something like that." "And he managed, and this was the genius to make a dot, a line, and a squiggle human so you cared about them." "His worried friends noticed how terribly thin and drawn he was  and did their best to cheer him up." ""She's not good enough for you."" ""She lacks depth."" ""They all look alike anyway."" ""Why don't you find a nice straight line and settle down?"" "But he hardly heard a word they said." "For any way he looked at her  she was perfect." "It's such a wonderful cartoon for its minimalism." "And it's so exquisite in its simplicity of design." "When he had all but given up, he discovered at last  that with great concentration and self-control  he was able to change direction and bend wherever he chose." "So he did and made  an angle." "And then again and made another." "And then another and then another." "And then another and then another and then another!" "It's character animation at its purest form." "Because you have a straight line and a dot and the straight line is stiff and boring." "And this squiggle comes in and is just so cool and like that and the dot kind of gets excited about it." "But it's not until the line realizes all the amazing things it can do." "It becomes another character." "He comes out of his shell." "Now he was dazzling." "Clever." "Mysterious." "Translating a book into a screenplay is something that very few authors even understand." "I knew the book." "I had read it to my children." "The Grinch was not a surprise to me because I loved the material but it was a surprise to me that Chuck could do it so well." "It didn't look like it was that adaptable to the screen." "The Grinch who stole Christmas  to me has always been a high-water mark of a character that you love to hate." "Staring down from his cave with a sour, Grinchy frown..." "When he looks down at Whoville, and you see this smile come on his face and it's all in anticipation of what he's going to do and you just crawl into his head, and it's an intellectual anticipation." "It's not just in the animation, too." "You really savor those moments." "The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea." "Chuck is the master of a freeze frame, a still where everything stops, and you can just hear the wheels turning inside the character's head." "And the more the Grinch thought of this who Christmas thing  the more the Grinch thought:" "I must stop this whole thing!" "Why, for 53 years, I've put up with it now." "I must stop Christmas from coming." "But how?" "Chuck was great on choosing voices." "Look at Karloff in The Grinch." "That was an extraordinary choice that no one had thought of and really was a unique concept of Chuck's." "And Max has got to be one the great canine characters in history." "There had to be somebody in there to observe what was happening  and reflect the absurdity of the whole matter." "Dr. Seuss, that is Ted Geisel." "He said that the Grinch looked a lot more like me than it did like his Grinch." "In a way, it was true, too." "He puzzled and puzzled until his puzzler was sore." "Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before." ""Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store." ""Maybe Christmas, perhaps..." ""...means a little bit more."" "We've relegated TV animation to the second-class cousin of the expensive features." "It doesn't have to be that way." "It's all about what is in the creator's mind." "I'd say that the great frustration, and in a way, the challenge for us in trying to make a live action version is that we can't compete, so we just choose not to." "You usually get less money as something gets older and MGM got more money as this thing got older." "So then you know you have a classic." "I think the popularity of The Grinch is testament enough to the fact that even in his later years he was still doing material that people were going to be looking at long after he was gone." "It is my great pleasure to present this very special achievement award to an artist who is a true visionary!" "Ladies and gentlemen, put them together for the hardest drawing man in show business Chuck Jones!" "What can I say in the face of such humiliating evidence?" "I stand guilty before the world of directing over 300 cartoons  in the last 50 or 60 years." "Hopefully, this means you've forgiven me." "The greatest thing for me was backstage at the Academy Awards  where he got his lifetime achievement." "He was backstage talking to all these journalists and he was talking about animation and comparing it to classic Greek drama." "Then he said, "The tragic hero..." ""...but with a coyote."" "He is basically the tragic hero, raging against the gods but somehow still finding another anvil." "I was privileged to be with Chuck that night." "It was his fourth Oscar." "He's received three others for individual cartoons." "This was his fourth, and it was for his career and I can think of little more deserving than that Oscar." "That Oscar was a great way of everybody saying:" ""Thanks for giving me more imagination than I would've had if it weren't for you."" "An important role that Chuck is playing today is as an elder statesman for animation." "So many of the animation cels have been destroyed and so Chuck said, "That's ok." "I can redraw them."" "Pleasure to see you." "He felt that he could recreate the moments  that were perhaps most important to him and to others  and that we could have those moments back." "Linda started it, really." "All the way." "He has said many, many times  how separated from his audience he was when he was making the films  and that there was never an opportunity for him  to interact personally with them." "Now he has an opportunity to shake their hand and hear their comments  and actually be a part of their lives  and it just means the world to him to be able to do that." "Chuck retired for about two and a half minutes in 1980." "Of course, he continued to speak and teach and write." "He realized it would be fun to do the drawings of the limited editions." "We've always enjoyed working together  so it was a fortuitous opportunity for both of us to follow our hearts, I guess." "He has given us his versions of some of the most famous cartoon characters in history but his versions are the definitive ones." "My favorite Chuck Jones cartoons are everybody's favorite ones." "One Froggy Evening is as perfect a film as I ever hope to see." "I think no cartoon can hold a candle to that, ever." "Nothing's ever come close." "That's the Citizen Kane of the animated short." "That whole picture, a devil of a thing was the most difficult picture I ever directed." "You know, it's the Jolson frog." "Michigan J. Frog could only dance and sing  when the man who owned him could see him  but he could not in front of anybody else." "But I loved that kind of challenge." "I always wondered what would happen  if you got a child prodigy that wouldn't prodige." "That's exactly what he is." "So the frog naturally says, "bllorp."" "You know what's going on, greed." "This is show business at its essence." ""I found a talent!"" "And it's a manager going, "Come on, little buddy." "Sure we'll pay you."" "Everybody wants to be rich, I'll say that." "I mean, I will assert that." "Except me." "All I ever wanted to do was to have enough money to live comfortably and to do what I enjoy doing." "It turned out that's what my life was pretty much about." "I think one reason why Chuck's cartoons are timeless  is because the jokes are classic." "They still work." "And the sheer laughter at human absurdity is always there." "He just created a generation of imagination in young people all across the world." "He's remained relevant and contemporary and funny." "All these years, he still connects." "For me, Chuck Jones is a given in our culture." "He's just part of the atmosphere." "He's part of the environment." "You wake up in the morning and know Bugs Bunny is out there doing something." "Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control we are unable to continue with this picture." "And confidentially that film didn't exactly break."