Maurice Noble - The Warner Bros. Years

The Warner Bros. Years

Noble remained in St. Louis until 1952, when he was invited to come to Warner Bros. to do cartoon layout for Chuck Jones' group. This was the first time he had done layout, which consists of designing the background environment and, for each shot, the particular viewpoint. The layout drawings and colorations are then used by the background artist (often Philip DeGuard) to paint the final backgrounds (see Chuck Amuck, p. 148 for an example).

At Warner Bros., Noble worked with Jones for a decade, over which time the team did over 60 cartoons. Turning away from the fussy realism of Disney backgrounds, Noble grew into styles using shape and color to define the space. The graphic look of his backgrounds could vary widely from film to film; he tried to make the backdrop fit the mood of the film. Noble says:

"I call it stepping into the picture. You look around and say, 'Gee, what's this all about, and does it feel right for this given picture?' And then you go ahead and design from that standpoint."

The Jones unit worked with much of the large stable of Warners characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner & Coyote. Noble's wide-open desert landscapes gave the Road Runner cartoons their characteristic spaciousness. The memorable cartoons Noble designed at Warners include What's Opera, Doc? (1957), a Bugs Bunny sendup of Wagner's Ring Cycle that has been inducted into the National Film Registry. Noble's futuristic settings enhance Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953). Other cartoons included the Academy Award nominees From A to Z-Z-Z-Z (1954), High Note (1960), Beep Prepared (1961), Nelly's Folly (1961), and Now Hear This (1962).

A break of about a year came during this period, when Noble spent time working on industrial films for John Sutherland's studio in the wake of Warner Bros. shutting down their cartoon unit, and did not return immediately upon the studio re-opening. In this period, Jones had his layouts done first by former Disney artist Ernie Nordli, who used an even more abstract (albeit less consistent) style than Noble, and then later by Noble's predecessor, Robert Gribbroek, who largely discarded the styles used by Noble and Nordli, and reverted to the look of Jones' earlier cartoons. Eventually, Jones coaxed Noble into returning to Warner Bros., and the two men would work together for the next few decades.

In the early 1960s, Noble started receiving co-director credit on a number of the Jones-unit productions. This reflected his increased involvement in many phases of the creation process beyond just the layouts, pulling things together and ironing out rough spots.