By Paul Bacon

Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.

If the cliff you were standing on gave way, what would you do? Fall screaming to your death? How embarrassing! Put in this kind of spot, most of us probably wouldn't show the grace and acceptance of Wile E. Coyote, who used his final moment of cartoon anti-gravity to wave a tender good-bye before plunging to the earth.

Maintaining character dignity is a cardinal virtue in animation, a whimsical genre with a history of violent tendencies. Most cartoons are made to tickle us, but their subject matter can be very dark and disturbing. Characters are often put through hideous manifestations: their bodies contorted, limbs severed, or their heads smashed between steel girders. How can viewers stomach such savagery? A great deal is owed to the abstract drawing style of comic animation, but it's also a matter of saving face.

In a THREE BEARS cartoon, angry Pa Bear punches his overgrown son Junyer in the mouth for interrupting his breakfast. Does Jones think that we think that this kind of brutality is funny? He has every right to, considering that scenes like this helped make him one of the world's most successful cartoon creators.

A dysfunctional family of bears.

If you've ever eagerly awaited your favorite character's next painful calamity, you know one of life's guilty pleasures. But rest assured, your sin is a mild one. Enjoying Junyer's misfortunes is basically forgivable, because while he's a hapless victim, he's also five times larger and stronger than his dad. Plus, he's about 50 times dumber (he is a baby, after all), so he's oblivious to the tragedy of his father's scorn. We wouldn't want it any other way, would we?

Of course not! And Jones knows this. For as much as he may plague his characters with calamity, he gives them all a measure of dignity in one way or another. Even Yosemite Sam, the crusty cowboy known for his disastrous attempts to snuff out Bugs Bunny, gets a little compassion from the master. "As the Grinch hates Christmas," says Jones, "so Yosemite Sam, who hates rabbits, arouses in us a sympathy. We'd all like the freedom to seriously, loudly, honestly, publicly state our hatred of something."

Glen Keane, Supervising Animator, Disney Feature Animation.

In addition to sympathy, Jones uses subtlety to express the wretchedness of his characters without going over the top. Glen Keane, a supervising animator at Disney, recalls seeing Jones' animated version of Dr. Seuss' THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS: "When [the Grinch] looks down at Whoville and you see this smile come on his face, and it's all in anticipation of what he's going to do. And you just crawl into [his] head. It's an intellectual anticipation ... Chuck is the master of freeze frame ... where everything stops, and you can just hear the wheels turning inside the character's head."

For all his compassion and finesse, Jones gets a long leash. He puts his characters through hell, but he is still one of the reigning gods of American entertainment. And when he simply can't give face, when he can't resist reveling in the misery of the damned, Jones still shows a smidgen of mercy. According to his autobiography, CHUCK AMUCK, "Rule 9" of the ROAD RUNNER series dictates, "The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures."


Images of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and The Three Bears: Characters, names, and all related indica are trademarks of Warner Bros. ©2000.