Chuck Jones

Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most notably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros Cartoons studio.

Jones was born in Spokane, Washington and later moved with his family to Los Angeles, California. His father encouraged his drawing from an early age.

Jones graduated from Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in 1932 and married Dorothy Webster. He received his first job as a cel washer from former Disney animator, Ubbe Iwerks at Iwekrs Productions.

In 1933, Jones joined Leon Schlesinger Productions that produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros. and was promoted to animator in 1935. Jones became a director in 1938. His first cartoon was The Night Watchman. In 1942, he used stylized animation for the cartoon, The Dover Boys.

During World War II, Jones worked closely with Theodor Geisel, to create the Private Snafu series of Army educational cartoons. He would later collaborate with Geisel on a number of adaptations of his books to animated form, most importantly How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1966.

Also during World War II, Jones directed shorts regarding shortages and rationing, including The Weakly Reporter in 1944. In 1944, he also directed Hell-Bent for Election, a campaign film for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the 1950s, Jones created characters such as Claude Cat, Marc Antony, Pepe LePew, the Road Runner, and Wile E. Coyote. His Road Runner cartoons, Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, and What's Opera, Doc? are today hailed by critics as some of the best cartoons ever made.

Jones remained at Warner Bros. throughout the 1950s, except for a brief period in 1953 when Warner closed the animation studio. During this interim, Jones found employment at Walt Disney Pictures, where he teamed with Ward Kimball for a four month period of uncredited work on Sleeping Beauty (1959).

In the early 1960s, Jones and his wife, Dorothy, wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Gay Purr-ee. UPA completed the film and made it available for distribution in 1962; it was picked up by Warner Bros. When Warner discovered that Jones had violated his exclusive contract with them, they terminated him.

He and his business partner, Les Goldman, created Sib Tower 12 Productions, an animation studio which was contracted in 1963 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mary for the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Their studio was merged with MGM and renamed MG Animation/Visual Arts.

In 1965, Jones' animated film, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. In 1966, he produced and directed the TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Phantom Tollbooth, produced by Jones, was released in 1970.

In 1970, MGM closed the animation studio and Jones created Chuck Jones Productions. Most notably, this studio produced The Curiosity Shop and three short films based on The Jungle Book.

Jones moved onto writing and drawing the comic strip, Crawford, in 1977. In 1978, his wife died and he remarried Marian Dern in 1981.

In the 1980s and the 1990s, Jones painted and sold cartoons and parody art and directed several animation sequences.

In 1993, he received an honorary degree from Oglethorpe University and later won the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Animated Special Project for the 2001-2002 Chuck Jones Show. Jones also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and won an Honorary Academy Award in 1996.

His work has been nominated eight times for an Oscar and has won three times with For Scent-imental Reasons, So Much for So Little, and The Dot and The Line.

Jones died of heart failure in 2002. After his death, the Looney Tunes cartoon, Daffy Duck for President, based on the book that Jones had written and using Jones' style for the characters, was released in 2004.