Daily post 30 Sep 2013 12:32 am
Meet Cute and then some
Maurice Noble probably first met Chuck Jones on the picket lines of the Disney strike. Noble was very sympathetic to the strike and was there throughout the anti-Disney action. Jones came from Warner Bros group as part of a support team that encouraged their brother workers onward. They felt obligated to support the strikers. This surely meant a lot to both – the creation of this new U-nion for the animation people and the protection of some of the helpless.
Certainly, Maurice and Chuck knew of each others from the product the did for the Army. They undoubtedly began working together during the War on the Snafu shorts. Jones directed some of them and Noble worked for the Signal Corps., so he’d have had a lot of participation in these films.
After the War, Noble ran into trouble and found himself without work when he went back to St. Louis leading a crew supervising filmstrips for Church-craft, an organization connected with the Lutheran Church. In 1951 he formally received an invitation to join the Jones unit.
Films done during this period include: The Unbearable Bear, done with John McGrew, Mouse Warming as well as Feed the Kitty both done in 1952. Maurice Noble brought a good advantage to the Jones unit. It reigned them in somewhat. Their design work was starting to dominate the WB films. Bernyce Fleury and Gene Pierce brought a wildness to the cartoons, and John McGrew, who’d established, this approach to the BG art was able to have a sidekick to pull the films together. This lasted until 1954 when Noble left Warner Bros for a stint at John Sutherland Productions. While at Warner’s his work was compared to UPA because of the raw flat art style he preferred.
Noble liked to pare down the Backgrounds to only their essentials. All airbrush and unnecessary highlighting and shading was removed. This made the work distinctive from UPA in that it was an attempt to control the extraneous rather than just dumping it. He was out for changing the art; not just for the sake of the change but for the sake of the art, as well.
Jones’s group at Warners: Fleury, Pierce McGrew all had made a place in the Warner stable. Their art looked like no other unit’s; However, it wasn’t necessarily adding to the films as far as the management could see. Under the supervision of Leon Schlesinger it didn’t matter as long as the films continued to make money. Once Eddie Selzer took charge things began to change, and there was a close watch on all of the art as well as in the scripts ans stories. This is, perhaps, why Noble stayed on positve terms with Selzer whereas he Jones was not liked by Selzer.
Still,in all, because of the talent employed some of the best BG design and painting took place at the Warner’s studio; no one could deny that.
