The 5 Essentials by Bob Deutsch Ph.D

Author:Bob Deutsch Ph.D. [Deutsch, Bob Ph.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

part 2

* * *

THE FIVE KEY PROCESSES

chapter six

Always Be on Your Way Home

CHUCK JONES was the multi-award-winning animator responsible for some of the most enduring cartoon creations of all time—the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Pepé Le Pew, and the definitive versions of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among others. Seemingly from a very early age, he was moving toward a path for his life that was uniquely his.

“When I was two years old,” he said in the documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, “something that occurred then probably had a great deal to do with my becoming an animator. I fell off of a second-story back porch onto a hunk of cement. I’m sure that it jostled my brain cells out of any hope that I would be a logical child.” Whether that was the case or not, Jones saw the world from a distinctive perspective. One of his earliest memories was of standing on the beach and convincing himself that he could orchestrate the movements of the ocean, the scurrying of birds along the sand, and the path of geese flying overhead to coordinate with the soundtrack playing in his head. Evidence of this signature connection between imagination and nature shows up in so much of his work.

So does a sense of wonder born from moving to Hollywood when he was very young and living in a world in which the lines between fantasy and reality were so completely blurred.

“It never occurred to me that every little boy in the world could not come out of his front porch and see Mary Pickford ride by on a white horse. . . . Our house on Sunset Boulevard was only two blocks from the Chaplin Studio, so we could go down there and press our noses against the fence.”

Juxtaposed with this was the dichotomy of his home life. His mother “felt that children could do no wrong” and supported his every effort. When Jones began to show a passion for drawing at an early age, she seemed to know instinctively that she should never suggest to him that she couldn’t identify what he was drawing, since doing so might have caused him to question his talents. The unalloyed love he received from his mother stood in stark contrast to the treatment he got from his father. “Father didn’t spend a lot of time in our house, which was good for us,” Jones said. “He criticized us terribly. He used to beat the hell out of me. He worked me over pretty bad. I remember once displaying that I had black and blue marks all the way from my heels to the back of my neck from him whipping me.”

In spite of this, Jones’s father managed to provide two valuable services other than staying out of the way. The first involved his failing in a series of entrepreneurial attempts. During each, the elder Jones would print new stationery on fine bond paper and order a supply of pencils with the company name imprinted on them.

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