Review, Hugh Kenner, Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings (University of California Press, 1994)

Columbia Missourian, March 26, 1995

In a 1989 music history class at Northwestern University, the professor began his section on Wagner by playing the Ring cycle. As the music began, the students filled the classroom with the chorus, “Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!”

As almost any member of the television generation would know, the reference is to the classic 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?, an inspired piece of lunacy featuring Elmer Fudd as a Valkyrie warrior and Bugs as both the intended victim of Elmer’s wrath and Brunnhilde, the object of his desire. When Bugs/Brunnhilde dies at the conclusion, a heartbroken Elmer carries off the corpse, prompting Bugs to turn to the camera and ask, “What do you expect in an opera, a happy ending?”

What’s Opera, Doc is a product of the cartoon genius of Chuck Jones, a giant of twentieth-century popular culture, whose effect on the cultural frame of reference of at least three generations of Americans has been incalculable. One of the four major directors responsible for the development of the modern-day Brer Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Jones also created several of Warner Brothers’ other most prominent cartoon characters, including Pepé Le Pew, the amorous skunk who speaks with a Charles Boyer accent and mistakenly believes a female cat is a lady skunk who adores him, and Wile E. Coyote, a contemporary Sisyphus whose eternal quest is a maniacal pursuit of the elusive Road Runner.

In addition to such series characters, Jones directed several brilliant one-shots, such as One Froggy Evening (1955), the story of the greed inspired by a singing frog; The Dot and the Line (1965), in which the hopelessly square Line is madly in love with the beautiful Dot, who only has eyes for the beatnik Squiggle; and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967), which used the menacing voice of Boris Karloff to bring Dr. Seuss’s characters to life.

Hugh Kenner, a literature professor at Johns Hopkins University, strikes a proper balance between taking Jones seriously as an artist and not letting that diminish the sheer pleasure of his cartoons. Jones comes across as a witty, erudite raconteur, whose conversation is peppered with references to a wide range of (primarily literary) sources, from Mark Twain to James Joyce to Georges Santayana. He is a master of comic timing; as he comments on the Coyote’s oft-repeated fall from a cliff: “Eighteen frames for him to fall into the distance and disappear, then fourteen frames later he would hit. It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn’t work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh.” (To put this in perspective, a single frame is briefer than the blink of an eye.)

The secret of successful animation, according to Jones, lies in the character’s way of moving. For example, Pepé Le Pew’s manner of running when pursuing the cat is the “pronk,” a South African word coined to describe the leaping movements of the springbok. “The Pepé pronk is a sequence of ecstatic vertical leaps, all four feet leaving the ground at once, forward movement perhaps half vertical, eyes wide, tongue lolling, the whole danced to a dream-tempo metronome that’s wholly decoupled from the panic of any springbok,” Kenner writes. “It’s contemplative, and what its contemplation postulates is leisurely future bliss, untarnished by any cynicism about ‘Jam Tomorrow but never Jam Today.’”

Furthermore, Jones comments, his characters need to be recognizable and comprehensible in both action and emotion. Thus his version of Bugs Bunny differed from the wildly anarchic character created by Tex Avery. Jones’s Bugs combined the “spicy, somewhat erudite introspection of a Professor Higgins, who, when nettled or threatened, would respond with the swagger of D’Artagnan as played by Errol Flynn, with the quick wittedness of Dorothy Parker—in other words, the Rabbit of My Dreams.”

Other recognizable character types include the Coyote, symbol, in Jones’s view, of fanaticism, for which he cites Santayana’s definition of the fanatic—“one who redoubles his effort, having forgotten his aim."

Jones’s genius rests on taking his work seriously without having pretensions that he was producing art. “I don’t know of any way to express it except by saying there are only two things that count,” he comments. “One is the love that you have for what you do, and the other is the work you’re willing to devote to achieve it.” But of the two, only the love should be apparent, he continues. “If the work shows, you’re in trouble. [In] Roger Rabbit, the only thing that showed was the work. But the love was nonexistent.”