Charles Martin Jones Quotes

Charles Martin Jones (33)

Birth:	21st September, 1912
Death:	22nd February, 2002
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Animator, Artist, Director, Producer, Screenwriter

About

Jones was born in Spokane, Washington on September 21, 1912. He later moved with his parents and three siblings to the Los Angeles, California area. After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute, Jones held a number of low-ranking jobs in the animation industry, including washing cels at the Ub Iwerks studio and assistant animator at the Walter Lantz studio. While at Iwerks, he met a cel painter named Dorothy Webster, who would later become his first wife.
Chuck Jones joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, the independent studio that produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros., in 1933 as an assistant animator. In 1935, he was promoted to animator, and assigned to work with new Schlesinger director Tex Avery. Jones became a director himself in 1938 when Frank Tashlin left the studio. Jones' first cartoon was The Night Watchman, which featured a cute kitten who would later evolve into Sniffles the mouse. Many of Jones' cartoons of the 1930s and early 1940s were lavishly animated, but audiences and fellow Schlesinger staff members found them lacking in genuine humor.
During the World War II years, Jones worked closely with Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, to create the Private Snafu series of Army educational cartoons. Private Snafu comically educated soldiers on topics like spies and laziness in a more risque way than general audiences would have been used to at the time. Jones would later collaborate with Seuss on a number of adaptations of Seuss' books to animated form, most importantly How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1966. Also, during World War II, Jones directed such shorts as The Weakly Reporter, a 1944 short that related to shortages and rationing on the home front. During the same year, he directed Hell-Bent for Election, a campaign film for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Jones, the second to last surviving animation director from the "Termite Terrace" days of the WB cartoons, died of heart failure in 2002.

Related Authors

• Frank Tashlin
• Mike Judge
• Eric Darnell
• Terry Gilliam
• Dave Rowntree
• Walt Disney
• Tex Avery
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher
• Nathaniel Howe
• Nick Park

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Today's Anniversary - 18th May

Births

• 1919 - Margot Fonteyn
• 1946 - Andreas Katsulas
• 1949 - Rick Wakeman
• 1950 - Mark Mothersbaugh
• 1934 - Dwayne Hickman

Deaths

• 1973 - Jeannette Rankin
• 1949 - James Truslow Adams
• 1915 - William Bridges
• 1901 - Maltbie Davenport Babcock
• 1895 - Jose Julian Marti Perez

• When critics sit in judgment it is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance begins.

  Charles Martin Jones

• Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

  Charles Martin Jones

• We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.

  Charles Martin Jones

• There’s only one test of a great children’s book, or a great children’s film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children’s film, or a great children’s book.

  Charles Martin Jones

• There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The whole essence of good drawing – and of good thinking, perhaps – is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The only time a wife listens to her husband is when he’s asleep.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The only thing an adult can give a child is time.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The Coyote is limited, as Bugs is limited, by his anatomy.

  Charles Martin Jones

• The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

  Charles Martin Jones

• Painting does what we cannot do – it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

  Charles Martin Jones

• Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.

  Charles Martin Jones

• Mark Twain’s Roughing It is a book that many people don’t know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

  Charles Martin Jones

• Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

  Charles Martin Jones

• In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.

  Charles Martin Jones

• If you want a midget to look like a baby, don’t put a cigar in his mouth.

  Charles Martin Jones

• If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.

  Charles Martin Jones

• I’m still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do.

  Charles Martin Jones