The lack of direct studio allowed the directors to experiment with comedy styles, different characters and animation techniques. So even if they weren’t very good, they were still going to be sent out.’ That means the cartoons were sold before they were completed. What you see in those days, I think the thing that saved us was something that can’t save anybody else now, is called block booking. ‘Jack Warner didn’t even know what we were doing or where our studio was. ‘The studio never knew what the hell was going on anyway,’ he later said. Jones was the last of the four major directors to join the Pacific Art and Title team, and he was immediately embraced into a highly creative and free-flowing environment. The company was contracted to produce animated short films for Warner Bros, and it was here that Jones became a critical creative figure in making the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. After several months working as a cel washer for Iwerks (he would literally wash the ink from already-filmed animation cels, so that they could be re-used) Jones moved on to the Charles Mintz Studio, then to producer Walt Lantz and finally to Pacific Art and Title where he remained for the next 38 years. To his surprise the young Chuck Jones was immediately offered a job working for the animator and producer Ub Iwerks, who had recently split off from Walt Disney to form his own company. To expect to get a job when three out of every ten people were unemployed was ridiculous, particularly for a kid without any experience in anything.’ ‘I came out of art school in 1931,’ said Jones, ‘right in the worst of the Depression, two years before Franklin Roosevelt came in. Two: the best short Chuck Jones ever directed was What’s Opera, Doc. One: the best director they ever had was Chuck Jones. The best ones do float to the surface of that mass, however, and of the 1,004 shorts produced under the two banners two things are, to me, quite certain. It’s easy to consider the Warner Bros shorts as one enormous mass of anarchic animated comedies, memories of one flowing into another until they’re just one amorphous cultural artefact. They may have started life as Warner Bros’ response to Walt Disney’s popular Silly Symphonies, but by the end of the century it was the Warner Bros legacy that was influencing Disney – try to imagine Disney features like The Emperor’s New Groove or Hercules existing without the Looney Tunes before them. More than that, the films pushed American animation further forward than arguably any others in history. These broadly comedic features starred a range of corporate characters including Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and many others. Alongside fellow directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Friz Freling, Jones was responsible for the legendary Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. Between 19 he directed 208 short films, ranged between six and seven minutes. In 1957, the year it was released, Jones was credited as the director of eight separate animated shorts for Warner Bros – of which What’s Opera, Doc was only one. It’s not a surprise that Jones didn’t dwell excessively on What’s Opera, Doc (its title includes a question mark at the end, but for ease of reading I have dropped it off within this essay). ‘They call that my “masterpiece,” which it may or may not be I didn’t think about it at the time.’ ‘ What’s Opera, Doc is one many Europeans adore,’ said animated film director Chuck Jones.
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