Chuck Amuck – The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist

By Chuck Jones

Avon Books, 1989

8" x 10", 304 pages

What a nice and fun read. Chuck Jones is one of the famous directors at Warner Brothers whose main characters are Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Road Runner and the Coyote. He basically started his carreer as an animator under Tex Avery direction. Not a bad start at all.

Chuck Jones turns out to be just as funny when he writes as when he directed cartoons. Imagine that. When he was a little boy, his family lived in rented houses. In those days, furnished houses included books. The family chose houses with not hundreds of books but with thousands of books. They would live there until they read all the books and then they would move into another house filled, yet again with thousands of books. Not surprising that he have such an enjoyable writing style. The book is fun to read from start to finish.

There are a lot of topics covered in this book, all in an informal manner. There is a section that could be qualified as an autobiography where we learn about his life as a kid, his family and the people and animals surrounding him. And there is this hilarious section where he describes a typical workday at the Warner Brothers cartoon studios. His description of Ray Katz, "the studio's slue-footed business manager" reads like a scenario for one of those zanny Warner Brothers cartoons and could easily fit a recurring character. On the other end of the mood spectrum, his description of Tex Avery is toned with total admiration.

The sections of the book where he talks about the directors, the writers (who did not write but instead drew storyboards), the animators, and all the people he worked with is filled with insights on how cartoon were made at Warner Brother. Not so much technical details but, more importantly, what drove the people to write, direct and draw the way they did. One aspect that Chuck Jones makes clear is that those creators got their inspirations from true life people and events. Ordinary people around them, ordinarily strugling with ordinary events. Those ordinary people were generally either themselves, their relatives or their work collegues. To accomplish that required that the creators and the director in particular, had a special sense of observation. Especially observation of human behavior. This is something I feel is very important to integrate in our times of emphasis on grandiose FX. This is something that can be felt throughout the whole book. And story ideas came from everywhere. For instance, once, the business manager came to the team telling them to not make a cartoon about bullfights because bullfights are not funny. So they decided to make a cartoon just based on this forbiden idea.

The section that discusses how the cartoons shorts were invented and put together is a little less informal. There Jones goes in details on the steps involved in creating the story. He covers every aspect from story (there are no scripts but a rough sketchy bunch of ideas), to the jam session, to storyboard, to direction, to animation, to music and sound effects. There again, Chuck Jones focusses more on the people he worked with but in doing so, gives a lot of details on how things were done. This turns out to be an interesting way to give that sort of information as it sounds less like recipees.

Then there is the section that, in another book, would probably be called "character development". This is where Chuck Jones writes about how the different characters were created and how they evolved with time to become what they became. Bugs Bunny, Coyote, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig are all detailed along with the other characters they met during their adventures. There again, this is all done in an informal way. Unlike Walt Disney, Warner Brothers cartoons used mainly recurrent characters in their cartoons so their development lasted for several years. It is most interesting to read Jones take on why some characters worked while other didn't work. And most interesting to read how characters evolved, from their birth to adulthood so to speak. Each character evolution is the result of a slow process of trial and error and adjustment. A stepwise refinement. A sort of search for who this character truely is. A search where the character would swing toward a type of behavior on one short, then swing toward another behavior in the next short, then a swing back, etc until the character's personality cristalize into something that all the directors and animators could relate to. As Chuck Jones points out, he does not draw Bugs Bunny. He draws pictures of Bugs Bunny. This is a profound and very important distinction.

Finally, there is a small section about character motion and showing their personality through posture and action. This is not your typical animation how-to but contains a lot of very interesting insights.

This book does not look like that when simply browsing through the pages. I had this book on my shelves for years and never truely read it. Don't do this mistake. Get it and read it. This is one of the best book about animation and most importantly, about the spirit of animation and I should have read it years ago.