Opinion: Chuck Jones on Modern Animation

Here's an interesting series of quotes from the program notes for a 1964 ASIFA screening posted on Mark Mayerson's blog...

The animator today is supplying a number of drawings, as few as possible in support of a soundtrack, as tightly packed with dialogue as possible. Today's TV cartoon show can accurately be identified as visual radio. The proof is quickly at hand. Turn off the picture and listen. If you can follow the story at all, you are listening to radio and the picture is only there to justify it being on TV in the first place- a more acceptable medium in this cultured world. If you can turn the sound off, and follow such action, the chances are you are watching a good, if old movie on TV. The effect is basically visual, not auditory. If it is an animated cartoon and you can follow such action, you are probably watching either the Walt Disney show, the Bugs Bunny show, old MGM cartoons or products of the Golden Age of Animation, where the accent was on full animation.

Pantomime can only be successful by full animation- animation pure, animation simple, it is impossible to fake. You must have an educated animator, one who has done what is neccessary to become an animator, and that is a ten year minimal stint as assistant animator, junior animator, journeyman animator and perhaps master animator. It is difficult to become a competent actor, but it is more difficult to become an animator. He must be able to DRAW action, whether it be an elephant, a housefly, a pterodactyl, or a sugar-plum fairy.

The tragic aspect of all this is contained in the realization that there is no master animator in this country or perhaps in the world who is under 40, and most are over 50. Unless there is a resurgence of demand for animation, all the able artists will be gone and a great craft with a great potential will perish too. But if, perhaps, we are doomed to extinction, we will at least know the logic of why we go to join the dodo, the giant ground sloth, the pterodactyl and the whooping crane- all of these animals were obviously invented by animators in the first place.

Which brings me to the "Dinosaur" part of this little paper. I decided that if animators, like dinosaurs, were becoming extinct, then I would face it cheerfully, but sink into oblivion in character. I would rather die as a dinosaur than live as a fox. The spastic cut-outs of today's "animation" are for those who can stomach them, but do not, I ask you, disgrace a great craft by calling what you do "modern" and do not call yourselves "animators". It is a proud name and should be reserved for those who find pride in it. -Chuck Jones, 1964

Read the rest of the article by Chuck Jones.

Stephen Worth
Director

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