Chuck Jones Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Among all the other inequalities in cinema, one of the oldest is the general preference for feature-length films over shorts. Very few short films are considered essential masterpieces, and even fewer animated short films have that title. It's even more difficult if you consider that a whole generation of us grew up watching hours upon hours of cartoons on television (with commercials), without the knowledge or experience to discern that some of them might have been actual works of genius or art. How many times, for example, did I watch Chuck Jones's What's Opera Doc? (1957) without really contemplating or even noticing the detail and the imagination that went into it. I didn't know at the time that I would eventually go on to call it the Citizen Kane of cartoons.

Now the blog Shooting Down Pictures has compiled an essential list of 100 Important Directors of Animated Short Films, which -- at the very least -- gives us a starting point. The introduction specifies that the list is simply 100 important directors, and not THE 100 most important directors. The very first comment on the list was: where's Mike Judge? And the listmakers replied by saying that these filmmakers are primarily theatrical and not television-based. (That explains the lack of Rocky & Bullwinkle, too.) The list of directors was originally created when the folks behind the great movie-list website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? decided to make a list of the 250 greatest short films, which never materialized.

Recently down for a week to pick up some kultcha in the "hateful megalopolis," as R. Crumb described Los Angeles, I caught a recurring cabaret night of bad cartoons titled Cartoon Dump! hosted by Jerry Beck, an internationally known authority on animation. Frank Conniff, best known as TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000, was on hand in costume as "Moodsy," a clinically depressed owl. The slim comedienne Erica Doering played Compost Brite! the cute, lisping dumpster-diving elf who had retrieved from the garbage a bunch of stinky cartoons that the world might be well without. Beck and Company dug up some real lulus. Hard to top was the opening from the 1950s, Paddy the Pelican.

You knew you were in for it right from the cackling theme song, seemingly a version of "The Irish Washerwoman" performed by a demented Canadian goose in duet with an electric organ. The graphics and apparently improvised dialog was like something a brain damaged-child might have come up with if you handed him a microphone and a crayon. You owe it to yourself to leave a few bars of that "Paddy" soundtrack on a friend's cellphone. They'll be looking over their shoulders for months afterwards to see if there's someone stalking them.

Animator Chuck Jones was born on this day in 1912 and directed nearly 300 short and feature length cartoons for film and TV before his death in 2002. You've probably seen many of them even if you don't know who Jones is, unless you've been living in a cave with no access to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. He was one of the top animators during the golden years at Warner Bros -- you'll find his name on What's Opera, Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, and other classic WB cartoons. I didn't realize until I checked his filmography that Jones also directed several of the made-for-TV animated films I enjoyed as a child, such as Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal. I did not, however, forget that he animated The Grinch Who Stole Christmas back in 1966, long before Ron Howard ever got his hands on the character.

The above image is from one of Jones' most memorable WB shorts, Duck Amuck, from 1953. It was a groundbreaking cartoon in terms of story structure: the animator is present in the film, getting involved in a duel of sorts with his creation, Daffy Duck. You can argue whether the film is postmodern, deconstructionist, ahead of its time ... but it's inarguably hilarious. I love watching cartoon shorts before a feature film (unless they're DVD ads in disguise) and wish that films like Duck Amuck, or any of Jones' shorts, would be shown before movies these days.