It’s a heartbreaking day when you discover one of your heroes is not universally beloved. Such is the case with the great artist who taught me the potential of working within constraints: Chuck Jones. Beloved for his Road Runner cartoons and classics like Duck Amuck, he is the villain of the Tom & Jerry fandom for his interpretation of the series from 1963 - 1967.
My interest is in the Road Runner, created by Jones and writer Michael Maltese in 1948 and originally intended as a parody of chase cartoons like Tom and Jerry. Jones would direct the series until 1964, ignoring some nuances of crediting in 1965 and then three later cartoons in the following decades.
Road Runner was better able to survive the drop in animation funding during the sixties than his counterparts, and in large part, it was Jones’s long interest in the creative sparks produced when he placed limitations upon the series. One of these early limitations was the Road Runner never leaving the road. Within these limitations, creativity blossomed.
“A moderate level of… constraints… frames the task as a greater challenge and… motivates experimentation and risk-taking.”
Acar, O. A., Tarakci, M., & van Knippenberg, D. (2019). Creativity and Innovation Under Constraints: A Cross-Disciplinary Integrative Review. Journal of Management, 45(1), 96-121. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318805832
There’s a connection here to a Darwinian approach to thinking about creativity, in that evolution favors those able to adapt within the context they’ve been given. Evolution isn’t concerned with creativity for creativity’s sake but with, say, having your animation series survive the television years when the biggest stars faded with the end of theatrical cartoon.
Allow me a self-serving example, but I was encouraged for years to develop a marketing plan and see marketing as more than advertising. I had no boundaries except my imagination and never came up with anything except a list of places I could advertise. Then I came to Substack and saw people complaining that it was built for non-fiction, not fiction, and that all the big successes came to the non-fiction publications. In considering how we might work within the confines of the Substack system, I finally hit upon the marketing plan I’d sought for so many years. (If you’re a fiction writer and interested in learning more, you can find the details for my Right-Reader method at literarysalon.substack.com.
This Darwinian view of creativity is a far cry from the divine inspiration we see in Plato and Socrates. It suggests that creativity has a practical purpose and that its spark comes from the friction of our needs rubbing up against the hard limits of the context we face. Perhaps the dreaded writer’s block comes from a limitless scope of possibilities and its cure can be found in narrowing those possibilities.
These are the nine limitations Chuck Jones placed on his Road Runner Cartoons:
Until the limitations of our next given context,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas
When I used to noodle around on guitar, I would sometimes break a string and not have a spare. That would force me to find new ways to play. KT Tunstall has a song where she plays a one-string guitar.
Of course the T&J fans would hate Jones: he didn't create them and they weren't entirely suitable characters for his modus operandi. The Road Runner was his and Michael Maltese's baby, and therefore their version stands far above the others.
In animation, if characters are being animated by people other than the ones who created them, that's a red flag for negative quality work cashing in on positive work that came before.