CHUCK JONES AND THE DAFFY WORLD OF CARTOONS;The Warners Legend Remembering the Glory Days In an Animated Autobiography
huck Jones has breathed life into creatures great but small. He's not only drawn scores of wacky animals, he's worked for a few; the bosses at Warner Bros. didn't really know what Jones and his fellow animation directors were doing in the little shack they named Termite Terrace, and that may be just as well.</br></br>"Harry Warner used to say, `The only thing I know is, we make Mickey Mouse,' " Jones recalls, as he has recalled before, and as he recalls again in his warmhearted and clearheaded autobiography "Chuck Amuck," just published by Farrar Straus Giroux. Mickey Mouse, of course, was made at Disney, another studio altogether.</br></br>Subtitled "The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist," Jones's book tracks his life from his first set of drawing pencils as a kid through the years at Warners, when he created the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote and Pepe le Pew and directed cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester, Tweety and many other brash immortals.</br></br>Chuck Jones was still a kid then, really. He is still a kid now, though in his seventies, and with the addition of a tidy grey beard, Jones looks as though he could be a nuclear physicist or a law professor, or at least the way such a person might look if all the cartoon characters got together and drew him.</br></br>He has a voice like eggnog. Maybe like hot tea with lemon and honey. Maybe like molasses in May. It's a voice that wouldn't hurt a fly, unless maybe the fly became head of a motion picture studio, and apparently, some have.