Museum Home
Main Collection
Special Exhibits
Film Theater


Family & Friends


On Friday, February 22, 2002, Chuck Jones died. An Academy Award®-winning creator of over 300 animated films in a career that spanned most of the last century, he was without doubt one of the most creative men ever to become involved in the animation industry. While the Walt Disney Family Museum tends to concentrate on work done by the Disney Studio, Jones' contributions -- through such unforgettable characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Porky Pig, and many more -- certainly hold a place in the public's heart and imagination that ranks alongside the great characters from Disney's cartoon shorts.

Chuck Jones

Though most of his career was spent at Warner Brothers, Jones also worked for Walt for a brief period. Some of his recollections of that time -- as well as thoughts about Walt Disney, himself, and others in the entertainment industry -- follow. These interview excerpts were extracted from a conversation held for the documentary about Disney: "Walt, The Man Behind the Myth."

Chuck Jones

Although the on-camera interview was powerful -- as we hope you'll agree when you read on -- some of Jones' most interesting thoughts came in casual conversation after the lights were out and the cameraman was getting a snack. Unconstrained by specific questions, his pungent wit and eclectic interests led him to talk about some of his favorite topics, including Mark Twain. Sadly, these weren't recorded.

 

 

Q. Tell us a little about how the Disney cartoons differed from those of the competition in the early years.

A. They had an accent on character, personality. Walt certainly showed it in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Nobody else had ever thought of the idea of having seven different people with seven different characteristics: one is laughing, one is hiccuping, one is doing the various things, but each one has a clear call for a particular human characteristic or attribute and there was no effort to make them interlock. The person who sneezed did not laugh. The result was, the seven of them brought together a great many of the human attributes we recognize in everybody.

Back to top

Q. You worked in a number of studios, didn't you?

A. I've been everyplace. But mainly, I went to work for Warner's in 1931 and I stayed there until 1965 then I went away and came back. I went to MGM and I did certain films there, in fact I inherited "Tom and Jerry" and I did a number of those. But I was a director almost from the beginning and I was very pleased about that because they let me do anything I wanted to do.

Back to top

Q. Whereas, at the Disney Studio, Walt was looking over everyone's shoulders?

A. Each studio was different, I mean, Walt Lance ran his studio with an iron hand. I think by the time he died he thought he was making the best cartoons ever: Woody Woodpecker. He wasn't, but he never knew he wasn't. So he lived very happily and of course he was one of the richest, because he owned all of his pictures.

Back to top

Q. You were only with Disney for a couple of months, when you left Warner Brothers. How did that come about?

A. That was because Jack Warner, in one of his more idiotic moves, decided somehow that all pictures were going to be made in 3D, and that babies would be born with one green eye and one red eye, and the audience would wear glasses to watch these first three-dimensional pictures. And to give you an idea of how Jack Warner's mind worked, when he decided to do this thing in three-dimensions, he looked around to all his directors and selected one that only had one eye to direct the film. It's really true. And I don't want to mention his name because he's a very fine director. But that was typical of Jack. Then, Jack decided you couldn't make three-dimensional cartoons, so he fired the whole staff. And that's how I happened to go to Disney's for a short time.

Back to top

Q. Any memories of your arrival there?

A. Walt hired me. Naturally, I went over there, drove over in my car, went in the big gate and they told me what to do. I'd been there before because I got to know Ward Kimball. He was a good friend and, to me, one of the greatest animators that ever lived, and I kind of followed him around. I don't think he knows it, how much I admired him.

Back to top

Q. And how did you find your way back to Warner's?

A. Well, a few months after he fired everyone, he had to hire them all back. At that time they had other jobs so he had to pay more money to get them back, which again was a good indication of the suavity of his intelligence. I don't mind criticizing Jack because I think he was a thug ... But I do feel that I was very lucky to work for Leon Schlessinger and there the directors had absolute authority over every part of the picture. I doubt if anybody had that authority at Disney's. At Disney, the key animators probably had as much to do with the development of character as the director, as far as I can see.

Back to top

Q. Was it frustrating for you at Disney to not have that kind of control?

A. That's the reason I didn't stay. When I first went there Walt asked about the money I was getting and what I was getting as a director, and he said, "Well that's fine, we'll pay you the same" and that disappointed me. I thought he was going to give me more money but he didn't. And a couple of months later I got well-acquainted, I say particularly, with Ward Kimball and that was a great moment for me because he drew so beautifully. But I discovered that the key animators, the sequence animators, had a lot more control than the actual director did. As far as I could tell the director had creativity but he didn't have the freedom we had at Warner's, because Leon Schlessinger didn't care what we made as long as he could sell it. And that was why we tried so many, many things. Why we had a great many more characters that were successful. I don't say they were all great but they were all useful and I think we had, historically there were about 40 characters that came from the Warner Brothers Studio that are still recognized throughout the world.

There was no such thing as a script, ever, at Warner Brothers. And nobody ever asked to see one until a man named Eddie Seltzer came over there, and he was a nice-enough man I guess, but as one of the fellows there said he went through life like an un-tipped waiter. He was always very kind to the person above him. That was the kind of man he was. He demanded to see scripts and he was kind of disappointed, very much disappointed, when he found out there weren't any scripts. We didn't have any. We just had storyboards.

Back to top

Q. Tell us the story of your actual departure from Disney.

A. Well, I just decided to go up and talk to Walt when I knew I was leaving. So, he said, "Well, why are you leaving? Don't you enjoy it here?" I said yes but I said, "Actually there's only one job here worth having and that's yours." And he said, "That's true, all right," he said. And he said, "Unfortunately, it's filled." But he was very nice about it. We were good friends, and then later when he got the idea of starting the art school, the art center, he asked me to come over and be on the board.

Back to top

Q. Do you remember his vision for Cal Arts when he first approached you?

A. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was the greatest thing. And he said that he thought that a great college would be one where people from various branches would be able to pass each other and observe other people at work. He said he thought it would be a great thing if an animator happened to be walking by a musician who was playing a fiddle. He said it would be great for him to stand there and watch it for awhile, and sketch him playing, seeing what the position is and so on, putting the handkerchief over the shoulder as they do. And he said wouldn't it be great because he would learn and the other guy would learn whatever it was the animator was trying to find out about, musical instruments.

Back to top

Q. You had a somewhat earlier experience with Walt, before you went to the studio, didn't you?

A. When I was a young, when I was an in-betweener, when I first came in 1931 or 1932, not when "Snow White" came out but when the couple of the great shorts came out of that time, "The Piano Movers" and couple of other great ones, "The Clock Cleaners," I got so infatuated with this stuff that I wrote a letter to Walt. A very effusive letter because I really didn't know how the hell you did this stuff. The astonishing thing was that about a week later I got a letter back from Walt telling me how much he enjoyed the letter, and he really appreciated my writing, that he was glad to have me in the same business, and so on.

That letter lay around for a long time. I figured he was writing letters to everybody. And then when "Snow White" came out I managed to finagle a couple of tickets to it. I was really knocked out. I was completely devastated in a wonderful way. Seeing "Snow White" was so far from anything else I'd ever seen. If this was possible, anything was possible. So I wrote another letter to Walt and got another letter back. Like a damn fool, I tried to save it but you know how those things happen. They just disappear.

Back to top

Q. And much later you found out something more about those letters you had written to Walt?

A. When Walt was ill, I didn't know it, nobody else did either. I was in the hospital across from the Disney Studio, St. Joseph. So I was up there on whatever floor it was, and this nurse came in and she says, "You know, Mr. Disney's on the same floor." And I said "Really? My God, that makes it a worthwhile floor, doesn't it?" And she said, "Well, he's all by himself. Why don't you go over and say hello to him?" And I said "I don't know him all that well." And she said, "I bet he knows you." So I walked over there and there he was in the bed, all by himself in a large room but not a devastating room. And he looked up, he cocked his head, he had a characteristic of looking at you like that. And then he finally realized who I was. "Oh, Chuck, come on in." So I came on in and sat down and he said, "Let's talk awhile about what we do, what field we're doing work in." Here I was doing animated shorts and he was doing features. But it didn't matter to him, as long as you were working animation, by God, we were the same thing. We belonged to each other.

Well, so I told him about the letters. I said, "You know you must have written four letters to me." He said, "I did?" I said, "What it meant to me, an in-betweener, then an animator. It's like getting letters from Mark Twain, from Walt Disney." And he looked at me quite quizzically and he said, "You're the only animator that ever wrote to me." And that was staggering, you know, I couldn't imagine that.

And then, I know I can't speak for myself or attempt to speak for myself in the same light as Walt Disney, but I've only received two letters from animators that worked for me in 70 years in the business.

Back to top

Q. Any other thoughts about Walt?

A. Chaplin said that he believed that Walt knew more about story than anybody in Hollywood. At any time. And I think that's probably true. He knew falseness when he saw it. And even though he was accused of being a little too cute some of the time, maybe he was, but what are we going to do? Throw him out the window because he was a little too cute?

Back to top


Use of this site signifies your agreement to the terms of use.
© Disney. All rights reserved.