“What’s Up, Doc? The Animation of Chuck Jones,” an exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens (NY) running til January 19, 2015 is reviewed in today’s New York Times – ambivalently approved by the critic in terms that bring to mind the embrace of a relative who doesn’t want her coiffure mussed —
Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the exhibition is aimed at a general audience. It’s cluttered by museum-produced graphics, reproductions and text panels. But it’s enthralling nevertheless, as it includes 136 original drawings and paintings and has 23 video versions of films directed by Mr. Jones showing — in whole or in parts — in a screening room and on monitors throughout.
The films include such classic Warner Bros. cartoons as What’s Opera, Doc? and One Froggy Evening and the Academy Award-winning short film The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics and the TV special Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The exhibition is a partnership between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, and Museum of the Moving Image. Next year it will visit the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Industry, and Seattle’s EMP Museum. (An interesting bit of trivia is that the Smithsonian charges $64,000 per 3-month slot to host the exhibit.)
On the opposite coast from Queens, as far away as you can get without swimming, is the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity located in Costa Mesa, CA.
It’s open six days a week and every Saturday kids of all ages are invited to “Drop In and Draw” from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. There’s drawing and an hour of cartoons at the end. Admission is free, but a nominal donation is requested to help cover the cost of materials. If my daughter wants to go, I will be reporting on this personally!
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Thanks for this info, Mike. It turns out the exhibit is coming to Huntsville (AL) which will be exciting for all fans around here. On the downside, we’ll have to wait over 2 years (!) for our turn according to the schedule on the SI website.
I’m not surprised the Smithsonian charges for the exhibit; the museums that show it will be raking in money, at least from an increase in general admissions and possibly from special charges for the exhibit, so getting some help from them to replace the costs of staging the exhibit is hardly unreasonable.