By Paul Bacon

Producer/Director Margaret Selby with Chuck Jones.

Asked which Warner Bros. cartoon character she likes most, Margaret Selby is at a loss.

"That's one of the things that made this project really difficult to do," she says. "When I first got the opportunity, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world, but then I had to follow through. And I thought, Oh my God, how am I going to present this wealth of riches? The truth is, I love different characters for different reasons. They're like children; you can't pick one. They still make me laugh after hours and hours of looking at them."

The Peabody Award-winning director, who has worked on Thirteen's GREAT PERFORMANCES series for more than seven years, has now brought her documentary skills to bear upon Chuck Jones' remarkable career in animation direction.

GP: What interested you in producing a documentary about Chuck Jones?

MS: I look at animation as being very close to choreography. It's all about the use of movement, time and space, and storytelling. I sent Chuck some of my work, he liked it, I met him. Then, I met people over at Warner Bros., and they liked my work, and that's how it happened.

Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck.

GP: What was the most surprising thing you learned about animation while working on the documentary?

MS: It's one of the most creative art forms. They're starting with a blank piece of paper, so everything is created. The color, the music, the storytelling, the pacing, the angles. And one of the incredible experiences of this project, for me, was looking at the original artwork. I tried to put in as much of that as I could. These drawings should really be hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA (Museum of Modern Art). The energy in the drawings just comes off the page. It's incredible stuff.

GP: Animation is a collaborative and often painstaking effort. What did Jones offer to make it all come together?

MS: In the early days, Chuck's team was not treated well by the studio, and they weren't given much time to produce. It was a sausage factory. They had five weeks to go from conception to completion. They also weren't allowed to edit, so they had to time it before it was shot. That's where Chuck's flair for timing became instrumental in the process. I don't know many directors today that could accomplish what he did.

GP: You crafted the film to narrate itself. Do you prefer telling a story without a set narrator?

MS: I do, because I've always loved hearing people talk from the heart. It's very easy to write a documentary when you can make a voice-over narrator say what you need to fit all the pieces together. But without a narrator, it's a real challenge to make your story tell itself.

Chuck Jones.

GP: Early in his Warner Bros. career, Chuck Jones was criticized for mimicking Disney animation styles. Do you think his work deserves being labeled as derivative?

MS: Well, Disney was at the top of the game back then, and most people agree that if you want to break the rules, you have to know the rules. So, in the beginning, Chuck wanted to learn how to do it the best he could in that style. Once he felt comfortable with that, then he could break all the rules and come up with his own. Besides, Chuck gives credit to the people that influenced him, and I can't tell you how many people Chuck has influenced. He's been paid homage to in lots of people's work. He doesn't mind it. He's a great teacher, and he's really quite a remarkable person.

[His] cartoons were not made for children. They were made to play film houses as lead-ins to feature films. Just because some TV executive decided to sell [them] to Saturday morning programming, all of the sudden animation is just for kids. Maybe some of Disney's stuff is just for kids. But these Warner Bros. cartoons, they work on a lot of different levels.

GP: Why do you think Jones' work has such widespread appeal?

MS: His universality of story. It's all about human nature. The characters have all the qualities that people we know have. In six minutes, he makes you care about them. The characters were really well defined, and they were all unique. And if you read [Dr. Seuss' original THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS] book, and then you go look at the animated special that Chuck did, you'll see all the things that he added to it. It's funny, because they're releasing [a live action movie] THE GRINCH now, which Chuck was not involved in. But they used his version for all their ideas, including Grinch's dog Max. Chuck took a tiny book and fleshed out the characters in the story to fill a half an hour. As a matter of fact, I can't think of anything that Chuck has created that hasn't served a number of purposes. Take Michigan J. Frog, now the WB logo, or the new Road Runner fast Internet service company. We all know his characters. He's a national treasure. We're lucky he's here, and we're lucky he's given us such a great body of work.


Image of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck: Characters, names, and all related indica are trademarks of Warner Bros. ©2000.