Bugs Bunny

A Salute to Chuck Jones--Cartoon Museum and the Castro Theater

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San Francisco, CA:  The Cartoon Art Museum in partnership with The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity and The Castro Theatre is proud to host A Salute to Chuck Jones, a select screening of classic Warner Bros. cartoons by the four-time Academy Award-winning animator and director. The program will feature 35mm prints from the Jones family archives, spotlighting over a dozen iconic shorts includingWhat’s Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening, Feed the Kitty, Duck Amuck, and Rabbit of Seville.Special guests will be on hand to introduce their favorite cartoons and to celebrate Jones’s legacy. Following the program, a VIP reception will be held with our guest presenters in the theater’s upper balcony.  

This screening takes place on Sunday, July 10, 2016, from 12pm to 3pm.  Advance tickets for this event can be purchased through Guestlist.com: https://guestlistapp.com/events/421977

Ticket levels:

Reserved seating (center aisle section) plus gift bag – $17

Reserved seating (center aisle section) plus gift bag and individual membership to the Cartoon Art Museum – $50

Reserved seating for 2 (center aisle section) plus gift bag and family membership to the Cartoon Art Museum – $75

Reserved VIP seating (orchestra area) plus gift bag, family membership to the Cartoon Art Museum, and reception with guest presenters – $150

The Castro Theatre generously sponsors this event, with proceeds benefiting the Cartoon Art Museum and theChuck Jones Center for Creativity.

About the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity

Founded in 1999 by award-winning animator and director Chuck Jones, the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity aims to inspire the innate creative genius within each person that leads to a more joyous, passionate, and harmonious life and world. Located in Costa Mesa, California, the nonprofit Center presents exhibitions, lectures, art classes, and film festivals, all of which spring from its collection of Chuck Jones writing, art, and other ephemera. For more information, visit chuckjonescenter.org.

About the Castro Theatre

Built in 1922 by pioneering San Francisco theatre entrepreneurs the Nasser brothers, the Castro Theatre become a city landmark and host to many Bay Area hits including the popular Castro Theatre Sing-A-Long series. For more information, visit castrotheatre.com.

Cartoon Art Museum • San Francisco, CA • 415-CAR-TOON • www.cartoonart.org

The Cartoon Art Museum is a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, study and exhibition of original cartoon art in all forms.

...There's a New Rabbit in Town

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"What's Up, Doc? The Animated Art of Chuck Jones" opens Saturday, February 14th in Fort Worth, Texas a their Museum of Science and History.Chuck's daughter, Linda Jones Clough, and his granddaughter, Valerie Kausen, will be special guests on opening day. The exhibit, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibits with the collaboration of the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Beverly Hills, and the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, Costa Mesa, explores what it takes to make a cartoon and how Chuck Jones's unique perspective on film-making, his comedic genius, precision timing, and intense focus on character shaped and guided the evolution of the animated film. It is a not-to-be-missed exhibit.

For more information, visit the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History website by clicking this sentence.

Will Friedwald on Chuck Jones in the Wall Street Journal

The Man Behind the Looney Tunes

How Bugs and Daffy came to life.

 

By

Will Friedwald

July 18, 2014 6:05 p.m. ET

'Duck Amuck' (1953) is a benchmark of American film comedy Chuck Jones Center for Creativity/TM Warner Bros.

Queens, N.Y.

By 1953, nearly every Hollywood cartoon seemed to be about conflict: Somebody was always chasing or hunting somebody else. But in Chuck Jones's remarkable "Duck Amuck," the confrontation was between Daffy Duck and the off-screen animator who controlled his pen-and-ink destiny. The brief, seven-minute piece continually broke through the cinematic "fourth wall" in a way no live-action film ever could, but at the time that was hardly a new idea: Cartoon characters had been directly addressing movie audiences for years. What made "Duck Amuck" a classic was the degree to which Daffy—as directed by Jones, animated by Ken Harris and voiced by Mel Blanc—becomes such a believable character. No matter how many times his image is erased and redrawn, Daffy remains completely three-dimensional in a two-dimensional medium as he goes on an emotional journey through confusion, anger and, ultimately, resignation, in which he constantly bickers and bargains with his creator. Every aspect of the film reminds us that Daffy is just a drawing, and yet, over the past 60 years, Daffy has become no less real to us than Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart. With a less-believable star, the conceit of character vs. animator could have been a big snooze; instead, with this "despicable" fall guy of a leading man placed in the accomplished hands of Jones and company, "Duck Amuck" became a masterpiece of American film comedy.

What's Up, Doc?

The Animation Art

Of Chuck Jones

Museum of the Moving Image

Through Jan. 19

Charles M. Jones (1912-2002) was, in fact, easily one of the greatest comedy directors in the history of motion pictures, indisputably on a par with Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen. Jones's role in the history of animation and film comedy is explored in a new exhibit, "What's Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones," which opened Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image. The exhibition, a co-production of the Smithsonian, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, and MoMI, will close in January and then tour the country through 2019. It includes more than 125 pieces of production artwork on display and 23 of Jones's cartoons, some screened in two different film shows and others as part of the exhibit itself.

Even though Jones would never be as famous as the characters he directed or helped create—Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner and Coyote, and Pepe Le Pew, among others—he came closer than any animated filmmaker (after Walt Disney) to attaining the name-above-the-title status of a Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock or Martin Scorsese. In 1996, the Motion Picture Academy presented Jones with an Honorary Academy Award—a lifetime-achievement award to add to the three Oscars he already won for best short.

In a sense, Jones is an even more distinctive stylist than any Hollywood feature director; you can quickly identify his work from just a single frame, the same way you can immediately distinguish between comic strips by George Harriman and Al Capp. Jones's earliest directorial efforts, particularly those starring the talkative, rather phlegmatic mouse named "Sniffles," show an ability to create a naturalistic, believable character—but little else. By World War II, however, Jones was in step with the rest of the studio in placing his characters in situations that were fast and funny.

Like Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, Jones was a visionary who brought a touch of the avant-garde to the mainstream—he encouraged his animators and designers to push the limits of the animated medium and do things that had never been done before, with faster, razor-sharp timing and a bolder, more innovative look. He was miraculously subtle: "Cartoon" implies the broadest possible action and situations, but Jones's work was all about the tiniest of nuances. It isn't just that Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff in his Acme-aided efforts to catch the Road Runner—it's the tiny, almost unnoticeable puff of smoke that appears at the bottom of the canyon that seals the deal.

Throughout the 1950s, Jones turned out classics with astonishing regularity, making the now-established Looney Tunes formulas work better than anyone else could by continually turning them on their head: "One Froggy Evening" (1955) pivots around a frog who miraculously sings and dances; "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957) overlays two sets of myths on top of each other: the pantheon of Norse-Germanic deities (as codified by Richard Wagner in his "Ring" cycle) and the equally well-known and oft-told rabbit-hunting framework (as codified by Tex Avery in the 1940 "A Wild Hare"). Thus Elmer in a viking helmet chases Bugs, who is disguised in drag as Wagner's metal-bosomed Valkyrie Brünnhilde. When Elmer finally "kills the wabbit," he is overcome with remorse and begins toting the lifeless carcass to Valhalla in a climax of "wabbiterdamewung."

(Oddly, "Duck Amuck," "One Froggy Evening" and "What's Opera, Doc?" aren't among Jones's Oscar-winning efforts.)

It was, indeed, a twilight of the gods in the Hollywood studio system as the regime—for both live and animated film—was already being dismantled. Yet Jones went on to do some of his best work in the years that followed, including the two best adaptations of Dr. Seuss stories: "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (1966) and "Horton Hears a Who" (1970). He lived to be an elder statesman, with a broad range of stylistic descendants not only in animation (the climactic scene in "Monsters, Inc." is an homage to Jones's 1952 "Feed the Kitty"), but live-action feature films, television, theater and even music. Jones said over and over—to me and anyone else who ever knew him—that his characters embodied different aspects of himself: Bugs was the suave, cool customer he aspired to be, but Daffy more accurately embodied his real-life frustrations while the Coyote represented his perceived ineptitude with tools. In laying out his own foibles for the whole world to laugh at, Jones touched us in a way that other directors could only dream about.

Mr. Friedwald writes the weekly Jazz Scene column for the Journal.

Sommy Rhee spotlights The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity on her blog!

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Sommy Rhee recently highlighted The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity on her blog. Sommy posted a wonderful article highlighting our Drop In and Draw session and our gallery. Check out the photos she took! She's also a contributor for Red Tricycle, so check her article about The OC Mix and the Center! We hope to see more of Sommy and her family at the Center!

 

Saturday mornings, our family has been hanging out at the SOCO Farmer’s Market & the OC Mart Mix.  This is our favorite family-friendly destination. There is always something new or cool going on here, and the best part is that it isn’t too crowded so it’s perfect with people like us who have two young kids….Read more

 

Saturday Morning Cartoons and Quick Draw @ The Center for Living Peace 1/5/13

Come visit us at the Center for Living Peace for Saturday Morning Cartoons and Quick Draw with Doug Lothers. Watch a Chuck Jones cartoon and appreciate the process of classic animation. Doug will "Show 'n Tell" some of the tricks of the classic trade; he'll bring in model sheets, a drawing disc, 35mm movie film, and animation cels.11:30a-12:30p

Donations accepted

Center For Living Peace

4139 Campus Drive

Irvine,California  92612

"What's Up, Doc? The Animated Art of Chuck Jones" Exhibit Opens at LSU, Baton Rouge!

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 Robin Miller, writing in Sunday's "The Advocate" (the daily newspaper in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), interviewed Craig Kausen, chairman of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity and Chuck Jones's grandson. She begins the interview: 

"You stand among Bugs and Daffy and Porky and Pepe.

"Ah, yes, The ever-romantic Pepe Le Pew, who has been a part of your life since, well, when? Since you can remember — really remember — laughing? Since you first watched the fuse blow up in Wile E. Coyote’s face while the Roadrunner zooms by?

"Or could it be the realization that though the characters and gags haven’t changed through the years, your understanding of them has? That’s when it hits you, when you realize Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes characters are a part of your life. No, it runs deeper than that. They’re as much a part of you as they are Craig Kausen." To read the entire article, click here.

Chuck Jones Film Retrospective Tonight!

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The perfect way to enjoy a Satruday: Turner Classic Movies will be honoring Chuck Jones's centennial year with a film retrospective on Saturday, March 24th.  Click here for the play list and times.  You'll be treated to a panoply of Jones's most cherished cartoons, starring your favorite Looney Tunes characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, and Pepe le Pew.  Make some popcorn and stay up late to watch his only feature film, "The Phantom Tollbooth" and look for him in a cameo role! I can hear the laughter already...can't you?