Tom and Jerry, American animated cartoon series about a hapless cat’s never-ending pursuit of a clever mouse. Not yet named in their debut theatrical short, Puss Gets the Boot (1940), Tom (the scheming cat) and Jerry (the spunky mouse) nonetheless were a hit with audiences. Animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera produced more than 100 episodes for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Several of these—including Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), The Cat Concerto (1946), and Johann Mouse (1952)—won Academy Awards for best animated short subject. In most episodes Jerry foiled Tom’s efforts to catch him and lived to annoy him another day—though occasionally Tom got the upper hand, or the two would join forces against a common enemy. The series was driven entirely by action and visual humour; the characters almost never spoke. After Hanna and Barbera left MGM, the series was revived several times, most notably in the mid-1960s under the direction of famed animator Chuck Jones. These later versions changed certain elements of the series and softened the violence. The shorts became popular on television, and Hanna and Barbera’s own company acquired the rights to create new Tom and Jerry episodes specifically for the small screen, producing 48 stories between 1975 and 1977. The show remained a television staple for decades, although racist or other offensive elements from the early features were usually edited. Tom and Jerry: The Movie premiered in 1992 in Europe and appeared on American screens the following year. In 2006 Warner Bros. debuted a new television series, Tom and Jerry Tales, which was closely modeled after the original theatrical shorts. Tom and Jerry (2021), a mix of live action and animation, was a surprise box office hit, grossing more than $100 million worldwide.Many of Jones’s animated films are recognized as classics of the form, including Feed the Kitty (1952), about an unusual paternal relationship between a bulldog and a kitten; Duck Amuck (1953), a tour de force of personality animation starring Daffy Duck as the victim of the creative whims of an unseen animator; One Froggy Evening (1955), a parable of greed involving a singing frog; and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), a brilliant compression of Richard Wagner’s 14-hour The Ring of the Nibelung into six minutes. Jones is also noted for such daring minimalist efforts as High Note (1960), featuring animated musical notes, and The Dot and the Line (1965), the tale of a love triangle between a dot, a straight line, and a squiggle. Jones also served as director, writer, or adviser for various studios on several animated feature films, including Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), the Warner Brothers-United Productions of America (UPA) release Gay Purr-ee (1962), and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1969). To the general public, Chuck Jones’s name is as synonymous with animation as that of Walt Disney. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Jones extended the perimeters of the indigenous American art form known as “character,” or “personality,” animation. He won numerous international awards, including four Academy Awards, one of which was for lifetime achievement, a Smithsonian 150th Anniversary Medal of Achievement, and the Edward MacDowell Medal, a national award given annually for outstanding contributions to the arts. His profusely illustrated autobiography, Chuck Amuck, appeared in 1990 and was a critically praised best-seller. In his late 80s he remained an active guest speaker at colleges and film festivals and a supervisor of television productions. More important, Jones still occasionally directed cartoons featuring the Looney Tunes gang, such as the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote in Chariots of Fur (1994), Bugs Bunny in From Hare to Eternity (1996), and Daffy Duck in Superior Duck (1996). He also directed a sequel to his classic One Froggy Evening, the well-received Another Froggy Evening (1995)