keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

September 21, 2012 is the 100th birthday of Charles Martin Jones, arguably the greatest director of animated shorts in history.  While there will be justifiable celebrations of his life and work this day, his career strikes me as a very curious thing.  There was a period of brilliance, but there was also a period of decline which lasted much longer. I've wrote about Jones' career back in the '90s and while my knowledge of Jones has been augmented by many interviews with his co-workers (see Michael Barrier's site for many of these), my opinion has remained constant. Whatever your opinion of Jones, there are worse ways to spend the day than to watch some of his films.

Comic Book Resources has an interview with Dean Mullaney and Kurtis Findlay, who have edited Chuck Jones: The Dream that Never Was , a collection of the comic strip Crawford that Jones did in the late 1970s. The book will be available in December. I remember reading the strip and clipped a few of them before I lost interest. One of the ironies of Jones' career is that he received more attention and opportunity when his work was in decline than he did when he was at his peak. Crawford suffers from the cuteness that infected much of his post-Warner Bros. work and the coarsening of his drawing that also occurred then. I will definitely look this book over when it is published for the opportunity to see unpublished work and to compare my current impression with my memories of the strip, but I don't believe that Crawford is a hidden treasure that will add anything to Jones' reputation. This is not Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes . If it was, the strip never would have b...

Chuck Jones (top) and Friz Freleng. That's a Blackwing pencil in Jones' hands and he spends the interview playing with it. I don't know where the Jones interview was shot, but Freleng's is in his office at DePatie Freleng. I met Freleng there in 1978. For years, Elwy Yost hosted a show called Saturday Night at the Movies on TV Ontario. He would run classic films and TVO would send him to Hollywood once a year to film interviews that related to the films he scheduled. In 1980, he interviewed Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. Elwy was very much a fan, and not a particularly informed one. His questions were often naive and his reactions were overly enthusiastic. However, he did speak to a great many important Hollywood figures and was genuinely interested in their careers. I have these interviews on VHS somewhere and remember being disappointed by how superficial they were. If I recall correctly, you could see Freleng's patience getting a little thin at times. H...

Steve Stanchfield, proprietor of Thunderbean Animation , is already held in the highest regard for his historical animation DVD releases. Stanchfield works on a shoestring, yet the quality of the prints he uses, the commentaries and extras he includes, rival DVDs from multinational corporations. The simple fact is that he cares more for the contents of his DVDs than they do. Steve has outdone himself with his latest release, the Private Snafu Golden Classics . These cartoon shorts were made for the American military during World War II and were humorous tales of the many ways a soldier could screw up, risking his own life and the lives of others. What makes this release so special is that Steve has located the original 35mm negatives to use as his video masters and these cartoons, which represent the Warner Bros. studio at the height of its skills, have never looked better. Cartoons directed by Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin and Friz Freleng, with animation by Ken Harris,...

It's taken me a while to get to Stepping Into the Picture: Cartoon Designer Maurice Noble by Robert J. McKinnon. It is slightly less than one third of a good book and I'll explain what I mean. What's here is a fairly straightforward biography of Maurice Noble, the designer whose most well-known work was for the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros. The book is drawn from interviews with Noble and his co-workers and to the extent that it fills in the details of Noble's life, it is mostly good. It covers Noble's childhood, education and professional jobs, including Disney, Warner Bros, John Sutherland Productions and MGM, in addition to providing details about Noble's personal life. The information about the physical set-up of Warner Bros. and the personal dynamics of the Jones unit are the best things in the book. However, the writing sometimes stumbles. There is a story about architectural drawings done by Noble while a student at Chouinard. The drawings vani...

This Tuesday, March 24, Turner Classic Movies will be running four and a half hours saluting the work of animation director Chuck Jones. The complete schedule is here . Highlights include the TV premiere of the documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood , as well as such noted cartoons as What's Opera Doc? , Duck Amuck , One Froggy Evening. The evening will also include early works, such as Jones directorial debut The Night Watchman , as well as Prest-O Change-O and Elmer's Candid Camera , two early steps in the evolution of Bugs Bunny. TCM will also screen The Phantom Tollbooth , Jones' feature, based on the book by Norton Juster, made for MGM. The entire program will be repeated twice during the evening, followed by 1001 Arabian Nights , a UPA feature starring Mr. Magoo and directed by veteran Disney director Jack Kinney.

The Museum of the Moving Image is located in Queens, New York, in a building that was once a working film studio owned by Paramount. During World War II, the building was used by the Signal Corps for the creation of instructional films (many including animation) for the military. The museum, which I've visited, is definitely worth the trip to Astoria. In addition to the brick and mortar building, the museum has a web presence that features many interesting articles and dozens of podcasts with movie professionals. There are three interviews that are animation related: two with Chuck Jones ( here and here ) recorded on successive days in December 1994, when he was once again working for Warner Bros. creating short films, and one from 2005 with Brad Bird , recorded after the release of The Incredibles . Jones was 82 at the time of these interviews and he tended to ramble. Several familiar Jones tropes are here, such as his quoting Mark Twain and his screeds against producers. ...

I will, of course, remind everyone about this later, but Turner Classic Movies has an entire evening devoted to Chuck Jones next March 24. Included is the new documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood . You can read more about that documentary over at Cartoon Brew . In addition, they will show The Phantom Tollbooth , the feature that Jones directed based on the book by Norton Juster. Here's the schedule for Eastern time. Note that the last film of the night is 1001 Arabian Nights , the UPA feature starring Mr. Magoo and directed by Jack Kinney. 8:00 PM Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood (2009) 8:30 PM Night Watchman, The (1938) 8:40 PM Prest-O, Change-O (1939) 8:50 PM Sniffles and the Bookworm (1939) 9:00 PM Elmer's Candid Camera ...

(Click any image to enlarge.) As the semester draws to a close, I'm getting buried with grading, which is why I haven't updated this blog in a while. Without time to really write something, I'm just going to mark time for a bit. I bought this drawing at Gallery Lainzberg in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1979. At the time I was working at a small animation studio in Waterloo, Iowa, and every few months animators Bob Haack, Bill Barder and I would go to the Gallery. This drawing was obviously fished out of a wastebasket. There are all kinds of notes jotted around the image that have nothing to do with it. It was also folded in half. Clearly, Moore discarded the drawing and then used it for scrap before trashing it. Somebody liked it enough to remove it and take it home. The same day I bought this, Bill Barder bought a drawing from Avery's Dumb Hounded . I tried to buy it from him multiple times, but Bill wouldn't part with it. I was pretty sure the centaurette drawing...

A rather startling layout from Chuck Jones' Bear Feat . The trees are an animated pan, adding even more interest to the shot. The latest, and last, Looney Tunes Golden Collection has been released. It's the sixth volume in a series that has delivered over 300 restored Warner Bros. cartoons as well as behind the scenes documentaries and commentaries. This edition contains two live action films of the staff made for Christmas parties in 1939 and 1940, several Captain and the Kids cartoons directed by Friz Freleng at MGM, two TV specials, a documentary on Mel Blanc, a generous selection of early black and white cartoons as well as propaganda cartoons made during World War II. All this in addition to a generous helping of the expected Warner Bros. cartoons. While Warner Bros. will undoubtedly continue to release cartoons on DVD, this may be the last time we see such elaborate extras and relatively obscure cartoons. My guess (and fear) is that we'll be inundated with no-f...