Charles Martin Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, painter, voice actor and filmmaker, best known for his work with Warner Bros. Cartoons on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of shorts.

He wrote, produced, and/or directed many classic animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, and Porky Pig, among others.

Jones started his career in 1933 alongside Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, and Robert McKimson at the Leon Schlesinger Production's Termite Terrace studio, the studio that made Warner Brothers cartoons, where they created and developed the Looney Tunes characters.

During the Second World War, Jones directed many of the Private Snafu (1943–1946) shorts which were shown to members of the United States military.

After his career at Warner Bros. ended in 1962, Jones started Sib Tower 12 Productions and began producing cartoons for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including a new series of Tom and Jerry shorts (1963–1967) as well as the television adaptations of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

He later started his own studio, Chuck Jones Enterprises, where he directed and produced the film adaptation of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (1970).

He was also profiled in the American Masters documentary Chuck Jones: Extremes & Inbetweens – A Life in Animation (2000) which aired on PBS.

[5] In his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Jones credits his artistic bent to circumstances surrounding his father, who was an unsuccessful businessman in California in the 1920s.

When the business failed, his father would quietly turn the huge stacks of useless stationery and pencils over to his children, requiring them to use up all the material as fast as possible.

After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute, Jones got a phone call from a friend named Fred Kopietz, who had been hired by the Ub Iwerks studio and offered him a job.

[9] Jones joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, the independent studio that produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros., in 1933 as an assistant animator.

The following year Jones created his first major character, Sniffles, a cute Disney-style mouse, who went on to star in twelve Warner Bros.

Unlike the other directors in the studio, Jones wanted to make cartoons that would rival the quality and design to that of ones made by Walt Disney Production.

[11] As a result, his cartoons suffered from sluggish pacing and a lack of clever gags, with Jones himself later admitting that his early conception of timing and dialog was "formed by watching the action in the La Brea Tar Pits".

Despite this, Schlesinger and the studios heads were still dissatisfied and begun the process to fire him, but they were unable to find a replacement due to a labor shortage stemming from World War II, so Jones kept his position.

[15] Jones created characters through the late 1930s, late 1940s, and the 1950s, which include his collaborative help in co-creating Bugs Bunny and also included creating Claude Cat, Marc Antony and Pussyfoot, Charlie Dog, Michigan J. Frog, Gossamer, and his four most popular creations, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Jones and writer Michael Maltese collaborated on the Road Runner cartoons, Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, and What's Opera, Doc?.

During this interim, Jones found employment at Walt Disney Productions, where he teamed with Ward Kimball for a four-month period of uncredited work on Sleeping Beauty (1959).

[citation needed] In the early 1960s, Jones and his wife Dorothy wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Gay Purr-ee.

The finished film featured the voices of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet and Red Buttons as cats in Paris, France.

[16] With business partner Les Goldman, Jones started an independent animation studio, Sib Tower 12 Productions, and brought on most of his unit from Warner Bros., including Maurice Noble and Michael Maltese.

[citation needed] In 1966, he produced and directed the TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, featuring narration by Boris Karloff.

(1970), but his main focus during this time was producing the feature film The Phantom Tollbooth, which did lukewarm business when MGM released it in 1970.

He produced a Saturday morning children's TV series for the American Broadcasting Company called The Curiosity Shop in 1971.

[15] Three of his works during this period were animated TV adaptations of short stories from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Brothers, The White Seal and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

[19] On December 11, 1975,[20] shortly after the release of Bugs Bunny: Superstar, which prominently featured Bob Clampett, Jones wrote a letter to Tex Avery, accusing Clampett of taking credit for ideas that were not his, and for characters created by other directors (notably Jones's Sniffles and Friz Freleng's Yosemite Sam).

It was forwarded to Michael Barrier, who conducted the interview with Clampett and was distributed by Jones to multiple people concerned with animation over the years.

[31] Jones died of congestive heart failure on February 22, 2002, at his home in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach at the age of 89.