This six-page article about Chuck Jones was written by John Canemaker in the late-1970s. I don’t remember how I got it or where the article was published (perhaps John can tell us himself), but I found the scans a few days ago and had to share them. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Chuck had written a book of drawing and animation advice like the kind that he shares with Canemaker in this piece?

UPDATE: John Canemaker informs us that the article is from the March 1980 issue of Cartoonist Profiles (#45).

Each year the National Film Preservation Board of The Library of Congress names 25 “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant films to the National Film Registry, a collection of movies selected to be preserved for all time. In previous years, Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera Doc?, Bob Clampett’s Porky In Wackyland, Fleischer’s Snow White (1933), Pixar’s Toy Story and several Disney titles including Steamboat Willie and Three Little Pigs have made the grade.

The 2009 selections were just announced this morning and animation was represented by Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (1911), Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), Janie Geiser’s art film, The Red Book (1994) and Helen Hill’s Cal Arts short, Scratch and Crow (1995).

Animation is also ultilized in two other shorts selected — Sidney Peterson’s avant-garde The Lead Shoes (1949), and Chuck Workman’s DGA montage, Precious Images (1986) which contains fleeting seconds of Fritz The Cat, Roger Rabbit, Song of the South, King Kong and others.

Though not animation, it should be noted that Jim Henson’s The Muppet Movie (1979; directed by James Frawley) also made this year’s selection. Check the complete list here. For your enjoyment, McCay’s pioneering Little Nemo is embedded below:

In 1990, Chuck Jones sat down with animation director Jeff DeGrandis to discuss the art of drawing and character development. On February 1, 2010, the non-profit Chuck Jones Center for Creativity will release the chat onto dvd as the Chuck Jones Master Series. The project, designed to be a fundraiser for the organization, will be available on two separate 45-minute dvds. The first dvd can be pre-ordered for a minimum donation of $19.95. For more details, visit the official Chuck Jones blog and to order the dvd, contact DVD(at)ChuckJonesCenter(dot)org.

Here’s a preview:

Oswald Iten has a sweet and short observation on his blog Colorful Animation Expressions about how Eric Goldberg is incorporating a bit of Chuck Jones’s drawing flair into his design of Louis in The Princess and the Frog.

I’ve praised this blog before, but the Chuck Jones blog, run by Chuck’s grandson Craig, continues to be a treasure trove of artwork and new information about the director.

My favorite recent post is this letter that Chuck wrote to his daughter Linda following his brief stint working at the Disney studio in 1953. In it, Jones gives his perspective of working at the studio, and it sounds not so different from a lot of contemporary feature animation studios:

At Disney’s it was always necessary to be certain places at certain times. God knows why, nothing ever happened, so it was nearly impossible to work there without a timepiece. You could get along without talent, but not a watch…. Ah..I think this was a good mood—I mean move to return here [to Warner Bros.], I had not realized how much I missed the sweetness of my own solitude. At Disney’s aloneness or desire to be alone generates suspicion, you are always surrounded by people, drifting in and out, exchanging hackneyed pleasantries or just sitting, staring with baleful intensity at one’s own navel. What a waste! What a waste of wonderful talent!

Jones also offered an unflattering opinion of Disney director Ham Luske:

I went to Disney’s with respect for H… L…., I could not fathom him but I felt that there must be some pretty strong talent there, not evident on the surface perhaps but still waters run deep etc. etc. If I still think this then I am the only one who has recently worked there who does. Walt adjudges him a work horse, stolid, unimaginative, but able to get things done if someone else has injected the life and the spark into the material. Many others think of him as simply and purely a dolt and a dull dolt at that. I saw too little of him to make any judgment, but I can no longer assume that he has talent. Isn’t that a pity?

It’s particularly interesting to read this letter in context of Chuck’s later opinions of working at Disney, which can be found in this terrific article by Wade Sampson.

Is anybody following the official Chuck Jones blog? Because fans of Chuck should be! Chuck’s daughter, Linda, has been posting a fascinating series of letters that he wrote to her when she went off to boarding school in 1952. Even though a lot of the details are mundane, the value of sharing these letters is immense. They offer a totally new personal perspective on how Jones handled being a father at a time when he was also at the top of his game. There are also some great animation-related bits sprinkled throughout the letters, like his thoughts about working on the Roadrunner/Coyote shorts:

Been slamming through another Coyote and Roadrunner, as I may have mentioned. These are sort of money-in-the-bank type pictures. We don’t have to worry about establishing a premise or continuity or character development much or trick backgrounds. Everything’s pretty open. Just sit down and start drawing and when all the gags are roughed out, arrange them according to pace, so’s the picture will build in tempo, find myself a strong gag to end on and I’m in business. Timing is a snap because no dialogue and there’s no worry about making it too long, because I can time the gags as I go along and use just as many as I need. All in all, life could be very simple and maybe a little bit dull if all I had to do was direct coyote and r.r.s.

Read Linda’s intro to the series and then check out all of the letters. Start at the back with the first post if you want to keep proper chronology.

The folks at the John Basmajian Collection have just unearthed - and posted - a reel of rare 8mm film footage of the infamous 1941 Disney animators strike. This is new stuff and incredibly rare. They even did a nice job of adding sound effects to bring it to life. Tom Sito points out, when watching the footage, to look for these highlights:

• The first man shown speaking on a microphone is Animator Art Babbitt.

•We see a shot of Walt Disney standing in the guard shack, hat on head and white shirt open at the neck, watching the strikers outside his gate.

• The second closeup of a man using a microphone is actor John Garfield, a matinee idol of the 1940s.

• The next shot is Walt Disney going through the picketline in his fashionable Packard.

• The next person driving his car through the disapproving pickets is director Ham Luske.

• The group carrying the Guillotine is the Warner Bros unit, led by picket captain Chuck Jones- the young man to the left in the black shirt. The effigy in the Guillotine was supposed to be of Disney’s attorney Gunther Lessing.

The footage is posted here.

Story artist Ed Gombert has started a blog dedicated to the work of Disney storyman Vance Gerry, who passed away in 2005. Gombert writes on the blog, “Fortunately, the geek in me started making copies of his work and instead of sitting in a folder in my personal archive I want to share these drawings with as many people as possible. If you look long enough at these drawings and paintings you will be able to see the kind, funny, humble and generous man that was Vance Gerry.”

The Gerry blog joins a growing number of blogs, sites and Facebook pages dedicated to individual artists from animation’s Golden Age, including:

Abe Levitow
Homer Jonas
Chuck Jones
Irv Spector
Ward Kimball
Claude Coats
Jack Bradbury

(Thanks, Mark Kennedy)