99% Invisible - 85- Noble Effort

Episode Date: July 30, 2013

If you grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, you might remember seeing the name Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits. Chuck Jones directed cartoons like Looney Tunes from the 1930s until his death in 2002. He was … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you grew up watching Warner Bros. cartoons and I really, really hope you did, you might remember seeing the words, directed by Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits. Chuck Jones worked for decades on cartoons like Looney Tunes from the 1930s until his death in 2002. In addition to being a director, he was also an animator. He gave Bugs Bunny that cocky slouch. He gave Daffy Duck those mischievous

eyes. I think Bugs Bunny's bar mischievous Daffy Duck is insane. He made a mute, wily coyote, hold up signs that commented on the sad irony of his cartoon life. In 1996, Jones accepted an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Well, I stand guilty before the world of directing over 300 cartoons the last 50 or 60 years. Hopefully, this means you've forgiven me. Chuck Jones is the name most people remember when they think about those cartoons. Hopefully, this means you forgiven me. Chuck Jones is the name most people remember when they think about those cartoons.

But I want to talk about another guy, an artist who worked with Chuck Jones, a guy who wasn't just important to Looney Tunes. He changed the entire art of animation. Yeah, the amazing thing about this guy is that he never drew bugs bunny or Elmer Futter or your 70 Samaritan those characters. He drew the backgrounds behind those characters. So if you think of like, you've ever seen Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century. Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century!

Ducky Duck lands on this weird futuristic planet. Or you know, the roadrunner cartoons that jagged bright abstract desert. That is the work of Maurice Noble. Here helping us tell this story is reporter Eric Milinski. Hey. Eric used to work in animation as a storyboard artist on the Rugrats and a couple of other cartoons for Nickelodeon. Yeah, late 90s or early 2000s.

So break down for us what the layout artist does in the whole animation process. All right, well, so today, like in a TV show, you would start out with a script, or in the case of looney tunes that probably that start drawing story sketches to figure out the gags, the camera angles and stuff. And then before the animation starts,

the background designer or layout artist has the first crack at drawing this world. And those drawings are then later painted in by someone else, but a layout artist like Maurice Noble who is really accomplished would actually have a say in the color choices as well. And so this is actually really important. So imagine you're watching Cartoon, and the layout or the background is sometimes the first image that you see it just pops on screen for a second. And your brain needs to instantly register where you are and what mood you're supposed to feel.

So, like, you know, let's say you're watching a road on our cartoon, you cut to this big boulder that's perched on top of a really high narrow cliff. You're going to immediately feel dread for the coyote. So the layout artist is kind of like the straight man in the comedy duo, setting up the gag for the animator who gets to be, you know, the funnig guy. Right, and they don't get much credit. I mean, they're literally in the background. They're creating this painstaking work of art

before somebody else plops their drawings right on top of it. So you have to keep your ego in check. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Marie Snowball spent most of his career working for Warner Brothers, but he didn't start out to win, you know, wacky cartoons. As a young man, he wanted to be a fine artist, painting desert landscapes. When he graduated art school, Marie's found work at Walt Disney Studios. His first job was painting an apple, and he said it was a very tedious process, a very

exacting process of just putting the colors down and grousing to match. He didn't think so at the moment, but it was definitely pampering him creatively. This is Bob McKinnon who wrote a biography of Maurice Noble. He says that even though Disney feature films that is really realistic and subtle backgrounds, you see every leaf on a tree or the shine on a door knob, Maurice felt like he was slumming it, squandering his talent on commercial art. In 1941, Disney Studios was torn apart by a strike. The artist wanted to create a union, and Walt took the walk out very, very personally.

When it was over, he got rid of anyone associated with the strike, including Maurice Noble. I think if the strike had not happened, he said he would have had a job for lifetime, it didn't he? I think he would have stayed there forever. But Maurice wasn't unemployed for long. World War II broke out and he was drafted into a unit that made propaganda films featuring a cartoon character named Private Snaffoo. We'll be trapped. Yeah, we still hailed shit up. I ain't no boob and I won't be trapped. Yeah.

As you can probably tell from that film clip, which has the very distinct voice of Mel Blank in it, the propaganda film crew was full of people from Warner Bros. including Chuck Jones. So I also talked with Todd Paulson, who's working on a book about Maurice's artwork, and he says Maurice found their style to be liberating. You know, everybody that was involved with those films for the army, definitely we're

able to finally express themselves. And then after the war, they got Marisa job working at Warner Brothers. He says, I was sweating, he said. No one knew how little he knew about that particular end of the business. And according to him, he was flying by the seat of his pants. I mean, he had done layouts before, but I mean, they were cranking out something like 30 short films per year. And just to give you a sense of how crazy that is. So today, you know, or at least when I worked in TV, you know, we would ship our storyboards to Korea.

Today, they would probably just, you know, email them to Korea where cheaper labor will fill in the animation or you could use a computer-based program like Flash to speed up the workflow. And that's just to make 22 episodes for a season. These guys are doing more work and doing it all by hand. Unlike that first painstakingly realistic apple that he painted for Disney, Marie Snowball comes to embrace the idea that backgrounds should be flatter and more cartoonish, more like the characters. Yeah, I mean like another example would be jungle book. I mean going back to Disney, it's one of my favorite movies because the animation

is totally amazing and it matches so beautifully the voices of those actors. But I've always been bothered by the fact that the characters are kind of flat and 2D, but the jungle is rounded with these subtle colors and lighting and the trees of three-dimensional shading, and I can never really suspend my disbelief that those characters are actually living in that world. And Marie Snowball felt the same way about Disney films. He always felt animation was a flat stylized medium, so he wanted the background to support that. The use of airbrush, he always felt the backgrounds that some other studios were fighting the characters, and people would come up to him and say, oh, you were inspired by Monet.

And this time he says, I don't think that way. He says, we're working in a completely new medium. This is a completely unique art form. And Marie-Sense of changing what Warner Brothers was doing because he's pushing the cartooniness of the backgrounds until they have the same sass as Bugs Bunny or the delusional insanity of Daffy Duck. Like in the Roadrunner cartoons, the coyotes reel and taginist isn't really the Roadrunner.

It's the desert landscape and, you know, the Acme Corporation, which are conspiring to make his life miserable. The earlier Roadrunner cartoons that were done before he got there, there's a few of them. They're a little more realistic. They're a little more just straight ahead. And when he got there, he started to use all these different techniques. And as he went along, he would have what he called off registration colors, whether the lines of the rocks wouldn't line up with the color behind them.

And he said that was to give you a heat shimmer. Which he knew all about because he grew up in New Mexico. He grew up in that kind of thing. He played in the rocks and he saw it. I'm sure all that influenced his take on the deserts when he did the roadrunner car to it. And this is how Maurice Noble becomes a hero to layout designers. Remember, his work is not supposed to detract from the characters. I mean, the layouts are supposed to support the animation and make it stand out. And he does that brilliantly, but he also develops

a unique and recognizable style. And it's almost like he built a stage for brilliantly, but he also develops a unique and recognizable style. And it's almost like he built a stage for a show, but the stage is winking at the audience. So I studied animation at Cal Arts, and so we'd be watching a cartoon like Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century. And we would burst out laughing because Daffy Duck had landed on Planet X and Marisa had drawn the clouds and the trees in the shape of giant X's. As Noble is coming into his own, he's starting to get co-director credit on some of the films, but Chuck Jones is still reaping most of the acclaim.

Todd Poulson, one of Maurice's predejiys, says that this became a point of tension between them in the 60s when they were working at MGM. It was a working relationship, and it became more and more strained as Chuck became more and more successful, especially in the 60s, and that came to a head when they made Dot in the line. The Dot in the line was an adaptation of a children's book. And it was about a dot that falls in love with a line and it's a story of their romance. Chuck Jones was the director on the short, but he was having trouble figuring out how to

adapt it. So, the executives went to Maurice. He said, well, if you don't involve Chuck, I can make this work for you. And so Chuck brought the stuff in, threw it down on his desk, and stomped out, and Maurice wouldn't show him what he was working on. Once upon a time, there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a dot.

You're the beginning and the end, the hub, the core and the quintessence he told at Endley. But the frivolous dot wasn't a bit interested. For she only had eyes, for a wild and unkempt squiggle, who never seemed to have anything on his mind at all. It's a very charming film, but it's probably the most personal of all of Marisa's films because it's really, just him on the screen, it's pure graphics, there's no classic characters as you might think of them as just dots lines is purely abstract but really beautiful.

The film is this pure distillation of Marisa's work and he's telling a story creating emotions and humor with just basic shapes and colors. But Chuck Jones still got director credit. And of course it won the Oscar but he said that Chuck didn't ever thank him. And Todd says that even though everyone knew it was Maurice's film, Maurice wasn't invited to the Oscars. So Chuck Jones and Maurice know what kept working together. They worked on how the Grinstall Christmas and a bunch of other Dr. Suce adaptations, but they fell out of touch for about 20 years until the early 1990s, when Warner Brothers reunited them to make cartoons that played before feature films. They hired a bunch of young artists

who just graduated from Cal Arts, and one of them was Scott Morse. Morse, no, but Morse, no, but where do I know that from? I was like, oh, it's because it was one of the names that preceded directed by Charles M. Jones on all of the cartoons that I grew up watching every day of my life. One of the first lessons that Scott learned

was that Marisa's fantastic backgrounds were not just invented out of thin air. Marisa did a ton of research. Everything he exaggerated was based on something in the real world. You'd get an assignment like, oh, you know, Bugs Bunny's gonna be stuck on a desert island or a stuck on a jungle island.

So there should be palm trees and it should be all this stuff. It's like, okay, great. And I'd come back with the drawing and he'd be like, what is this? And I'm like, are there palm trees? And he's like, those are stuckas. What were you looking at? It's like, well, there's a palm tree right out the window.

He's like, that's a stucka. You gotta learn your trees. But Marisa wasn't really that gruff. After work, he talked to these 22 year old animators like he was just one of the guys. He'd be like, let's go to the baseball game. Let's go do this other thing. You know, we should go to a museum.

Pretty soon you realize he's more like your grandpa who is just a really cool guy to hang out with. So Scott Morrison, the script of artists, became known as the Noble Boys. And Maurice pushed them to develop their own style, but his sensibility really seeped into their work. Like Scott is at Pixar now, which is the home of 3D animation, which we think is the complete opposite of, you know, the flat landscapes of Looney Tunes. But you can really see Marisa's influence on the Pixar films if you look for it. Like the film up. Think about that house carried by a massive amount of balloons, and lands on the very

edge of a cliff. Or in Wally, this cute little robot is scooting around these big menacing towers of garbage. You know, those are layouts that make you smile. That's classic marise. In May of 2001, the noble boys were reunited one last time. We all got, you know, the call of the Maurice. He was in hospice basically at home. It was just natural causes that he, that he was dying of. And he was pretty sure, everybody's pretty sure that that night was going to maybe be the last night.

So we all came over and hung out with him. And Chuck Jones did call that night. I remember being in the room with Maurice and somebody brought in the phone, I was like, Chuck's on the phone. And Maurice was like, OK, I'll talk to him. And we all knew for a fact that they hadn't really talked for months, if not a couple of years at that point.

And I just heard Mori's side of the conversation, but you know, you could definitely tell that they were, they had put everything behind them and they were friends, you know, and it was nice. And I, again, I don't know exactly what Chuck said on the other end of that line, but it was a very sweet moment to be able to see that, and know that people could go through a lot together in life and still have respect for each other, you know, up to the last minute and kind of celebrate what they had created together. To some extent, Marisa the Noble Boys is his real legacy.

He was proud of the fact that they had blossomed into well-rounded artists. If Maurice could leave behind this idea in other people to do their own thing, we would never be in the background like he was. But it was a beautiful, beautiful background. I actually met Marie's number once. Oh yeah? Yeah. I went to Cal Arts and he came into our class

on it, it was like a Monday night. And I had happened to have gone to the opera the day before on the weekend. And I was thinking about how often those guys made fun of opera in their cartoons. And I asked him, did you guys actually go to the opera regularly? Or were you just kind of making fun of it as a sort of you know high flutant cultural institution and he asked me what opera did you see and I said La Traviata and he said ah Velletta her death is beautiful and that is a man who knew a good death when he saw it.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Eric Molinsky with Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, but right now we have Marie Snowball layouts, the dot in the line short film and the strikingly politically incorrect private snafu. It's really of its time.

At 99%invisible.org Radio tapio. From PRX.