A challenge for Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones’ character Marvin the Martian, whose emotions are communicated almost exclusively with his eyes.

I go back to this video, from Every Frame a Painting, from time to time. It’s a brilliant short doc on the animator Chuck Jones, the force behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote, and many other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. It’s about his creative process, and specifically on the idea of self-imposed boundaries.

Jones has lots to say here about creativity, and the thinking he brought to Looney Tunes, and what I love about it is that it gives concrete examples of the limits he put on his own work. He refers to it as “discipline”, a set of challenges and restrictions that take both characterization and comedy to another level. Because of the endless possibilities in animation, Jones implemented his own rules on his characters, and their worlds.

He experimented with minimal facial expressions, trying to maximize character within very sharp limits. His visual gags had to be rooted in recognizable logic, and observations of the real world. Among his nine very specific rules for The Road Runner cartoons: No outside force can harm the coyote, only his ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.

I’ve tried to apply the idea of discipline and boundaries to my own writing, which has given me some guardrails while I’m editing my own work. I decided right at the beginning that all the action in my novel would be viewed through the point of view of one character. I wanted readers to know everything she did, and for her to know everything the readers did. This complicated the process on one level, but simplified it on another – I could test every piece of the narrative against this rule, and found that what was left had a very definite structure.

I don’t know if I’ll stick to this rule in future writing, but I’ll come up with others. I do think it makes the work richer, and has been a great intellectual and creative challenge.