Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist

Why do animated cartoonists use animals? For the same reason that Aesop, La Fontaine, Kipling, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame did: it is easier and more believable to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans.

A young man came to work with us at Warner Bros. Cartoons as a writer shortly after World War II and promptly and proudly wrote home to his grandmother in Denver that he was writing scripts for Bugs Bunny.

I can’t understand why you’re writing scripts for Bugs Bunny, the old lady replied with some asperity. He’s funny enough just as he is.

Believability. That is what we were striving for. Not believability by the audience; that will follow. But belief in the life of characters—by the writer, the artist, the director, the animator. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word animation: to invoke life.

What was implicit in what the old lady was saying was that our job was not to invent what Bugs Bunny did but to report his doings. Just as I, at seven, upon reading Tom Sawyer, would have been outraged at the suggestion that Mark Twain or anybody else invented Tom and Huckleberry Finn and their company. Tom Sawyer happened. He was not imaginary. He was real. He still is real. What else can he be but real? And there can be no doubt that Mark Twain shared that belief.

Character always comes first, before the physical representation. Just as it is with all living things, including human beings. We are not what we look like. We are not even what we sound like. We are how we move; in other words, our personalities. And our personalities are shaped by what we think, by where we come from, by what we have experienced. And that personality is unique to each of us.

Up to the advent of Johnson, I had little reason to doubt that the differences between cats were purely visual: size, color, sex (although sexual differences in cats seemed to be a secret guarded well by cats; I was not a precocious child at seven—just curious). If there were personality differences, I was unaware of them until Johnson padded in on little fog feet and taught me that first and most important lesson of animation: individuality. Yes, in looking back, I can see that it all began with Johnson, because Johnson demonstrated with such vivid certainty the whole truth of the matter: it is the individual, the oddity, the peculiarity that counts. If Johnson had stood up, which was unlikely since he was a cat, and pounded on the rostrum with his shoe, he could not have made his point more clearly to my seven-year-old mind: the only things worth watching in this or any other world are those that identify and overcome the ordinary. That summer morning in Balboa was a turning point for a small boy whose thoughts up to that time were concerned, like his cousin the shark, only with gastronomic matters.

And so I was all unaware that the first step in my destiny to become an animation director would come silently out of a salmon-pink dawn, each step leaving a small, precise, dry paw print on the dew-moist sand. Through the gray salt-rimed boards of our back fence he moved with the self-assured, liquid, dignified delicacy of a world-class welterweight.

With my fascinated nose waffled against the rust-brown screen of our second-floor sleeping porch, I watched him tiptoe through the dune grass and yellow oyster daisies to the foot of our back porch, then look appraisingly up at me and utter a single laconic Mckgnaow.*

He moved into our house that morning, bag and baggage. The bag was that cat bag all cats live in, one of the few characteristics he shared with other cats. He sat fat and walked thin like other cats, but the resemblance to other cats stopped there.

His baggage was what appeared to be a very old, very used tongue depressor, fastened securely about his neck with a bit of tarry string, bearing in violet indelible ink the crude inscription: JOHNSON. Whether this was his name, that of his former proprietors, or his blood type we were unable to determine, since he discussed his past not at all and responded to the name Johnson as well as any other, which was not at all; actually going in response to that name only to my mother and then only when she offered him grapefruit.

For it cannot be denied that Johnson was a patsy for grapefruit. Many a battered mouse owed his life and his continued livelihood to an unknown grapefruit offered to Johnson by my mother. Johnson would leave a Bismarck herring, a stick of catnip, or a decayed sea gull for a single wedge of grapefruit. For a whole grapefruit, he would have committed fraud or practiced usury.

I can only suppose that some vital juice necessary to cats was in short supply in the muttering Ferrari-like bowels of Johnson. He could easily devour a grapefruit a quarter his size at a sitting. Mother discovered this curious facet of Johnson’s metabolism one day at breakfast when Johnson sauntered up to the table and suggested sharing her breakfast, with his most ingratiating Mckgnaow. Mother, who was easily flattered, offered him a bit of bacon, a scrap of buttered toast, and the edge of egg white that remained on her plate, but Johnson insisted that she misunderstood his needs. After a brief conversation in different languages, my mother reluctantly offered Johnson the remains of her grapefruit.

Johnson and the Great Grapefruit Wars

There are historic moments, similar in nature to the Curies’ quantum leap from the sight of glowing pitchblende to the discovery of radium. That morning our family witnessed just such a moment. There was a sudden electric blue crack in the atmosphere like those preceding a tornado, as Johnson went at that innocent grapefruit like a tangerine-colored buzz saw: as the stripped shell of the fruit spun slowly to a stop like a twisting coin, Johnson sat staring dreamy-eyed, dreamy-grinned at Mother. As the reamed-out grapefruit rind whirled to a long loping stop, Johnson’s lox-pink tongue tenderly flicked a final golden drop from a whisker and whispered to Mother the single English word he knew: More.

Johnson’s normal Mckgnaow had the same lisping slur later made popular by Humphrey Bogart, and like Bogart, his vocal impediment was due to a deadened nerve in his split upper lip. This honorable scar left a small Gothic window through which peered a scythe-like fang to inform the world that Johnson was not a cat to be trifled with. Mark Twain said that if you carried a cat home by the tail you would get information that would be valuable to you all your life. Such information could more conveniently be obtained by meddling with Johnson’s tongue depressor.

Whatever else it represented, that bit of tongue depressor was Johnson’s sole possession: his entire estate, his chattel, his treasure. It was all he had to leave to his eldest son, and he treated it as a sacred object. Any attempt to remove it resulted in what can only be described as a physical threat of the most nerve-racking implications. Touch his treasure and Johnson simply went into a lightning somersault, coupled with a full-bodied, four-footed karate chop, in which the meddler suddenly found his hand caught in an inverted cat vise of sixteen needle-pointed claws, the offending hand flat against Johnson’s stomach, his eyes cobra-like, scythe-like slits of pure malevolence—one of Johnson’s feline canines caught on his lower lip, its amethyst point devoid of dentine, sharp as a scalpel, blue as a diamond. At this point the disturber of sacred tongue depressors was unharmed, but the slightest move elicited a corresponding slight extension of those sixteen curved stilettos. It was not unlike having one’s hand in a boxing glove full of fishhooks. If one wanted to get out—and one did—it would require the minimal help of four fearless human assistants of fantastic manual dexterity. It was possible to escape only if these assistants moved with split-second, simultaneous accuracy to pull Johnson’s paws apart. This method allowed one to escape with only minor wounds, but the safest yet and most unnerving way was to wait it out until Johnson had made up his mind that you were only kidding. This might take from five minutes to a half hour and few people had that kind of courage or were that free of panic or hysteria. So most unfortunates tried to snatch the hand free immediately upon being trapped, with results too bloodily ineffectual to be described. Only a half grapefruit gently dropped over his face like an ether cone would relax Johnson enough so his claws, like spines of a cactus, could be individually picked from the threatened