All About Chuck Jones Characters

A comic hero can be a touch character to work with. Bugs is such a strong character that he can easily seem to be a bully unless he receives some serious knocks in the course of a story.

Most of us know when we should stop talking, ad so does Daffy, but his where to stop is way beyond ours, and he repeatedly lands himself in trouble by going too far.

Elmer Fudd is smaller than many of Bugs’s adversaries, but he carries a big gun, which makes even the saddest of wimps dangerous.

You can appreciate his willingness to cheerfully and competently bring believabilityy and humor to roles that at the outset would seem to be puerile at best. He is, in short, a first-rate actor in supporting roles.

In the book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Dr. Seuss had already carefully determined who the Grinch was (or is). The job of the animators was to find out how to match in movement the believability of that character.

Marvin is one of those mysterious creatures that come out of the sky or up the stairs late at night. You don’t know what he thinks, and you don’t want to know. It is not simple happenchance that he appears to have no character. He is a Martian, and you cannot expect to find much personality in there.

If you can’t do it yourself–animate somebody who can–Pepe le Pew, for example.Pepe’s sexual confidence is absolute. He sees rejection as no more than a temporary setback, and every pursuit as an intereesting variation on the road to inevitable success.

Without the Acme Co., where would Wile E. Coyote be? And, for that matter, where would the Acme Co. be without Wile E. Coyote? It is what is called in some quarters, “a perfect symbiotic relationship,” which Noah Webster defines as: “A couple of different living things living together in close association for mutual benefit.”

This orange, lump-headed monster made his first appearance in Hare-Raising Hare, 1946. His one memorable line, was when it was pointed out to him that they were being watched by an audience, he cried out “PEOPLE” and ran out of the frame.

He is so unquestionably a dog. Charlie is merely trying to find a master and a home, which are perfectly natural ambitions for any dog. Comedy is always concerned wtih simple matters such as this.

Marc Anthony is your basic big bulldog, but in Feed the Kitty he falls in parental love with a little kitten, in the way any of us might fall for a cat or another small animal.

Ralph Wolf was a storyman at Warner Bros. cartoons, and he gave his name to the red-nosed version of Wile E. Coyote. 

Created by Chuck Jones in 1939, Sniffles went to star in 12 cartoons directed by Jones between ’39 and 1946.

Claude Cat is all cats, and not. He’s persnickety, co-dependent, and independent. He’s easily bamboozled and easily frightened. The slightest variation in his day causes him no end of grief.

Cute and sweet, and easily taken advantage of, Tommy Cat subs for his sick father one night guarding the kitchen to the delight of the rats.

Witch Hazel is a vivid example of the fact that beauty is, thankfully, deeper than skin, and that outward appearances can, in her case, be trusted.

Hubie is the brains of the duo and Bertie is the muscle.

If you’re going to produce an animated cartoon about a frog who will exercise his glorious tonsils in glorious song, from “Michigan Rag” to “Figaro,” but only in the solitary presence of his owner, while persistently appearing to the rest of the world as an ordinary slop-legged, run-of-the-pond, standard frog whose sole oral accomplishment is “ribbit”–how do you get started on this impossible dream?

Audiences responded to Ralph–recognizing his desire to do something dramatic to impress his teacher–and to Maurice Noble’s designs, which reinforce the films’ realistic but dreamlike quality. Ralph took his character from Chuck Jones who had no trouble writing dialogue or creating drawings for the Ralph Phillips cartoons, as Ralph is Chuck Jones as a child.