Chuck Jones, one of the towering figures of contemporary animation, died Friday at his home in Newport Beach, California.  Jones was one of the youngest and most creative denizens of 'Termite Terrace,' the cartoon unit at the Warner Brothers studio.  Jones worked as animator with Friz Freleng and then with Tex Avery's team for two years (1936 and 1937) before joining Avery and Freleng in the ranks of 'cartoon directors' in 1938.  Jones helped define the characters of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck during the 1940s, but he didn't really hit his peak until 1949/50 with the creation of the Roadrunner/Coyote characters and the release of The Scarlet Pumpernickel and the Rabbit of Seville, followed by classics like Duck Amuck and Duck Dodgers in 1953, One Froggy Evening in 1955, Ali Baba Bunny and What's Opera, Doc? in 1957 to name just a few of the more outstanding and timeless examples of Jones' brilliance.

 

Though he also excelled in longer forms of animation as is evidenced by his version of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jones' long stint at the parsimonious Warner Brothers made him the absolute master of the animated short.  Unfortunately, although many of his cartoons are available on VHS tape, Warner Home Video has not produced the kind of Chuck Jones DVDs that would be a fitting tribute to one of the greatest American animators.  Jones' highly entertaining autobiography, Chuck Amuck, is out of print, but a second volume of memoirs, Chuck Reducks, in which he discusses the characters in his cartoons at some length, is still available.