Gotta disagree about Chuck Jones. What he really excelled at was the subtlety with which he uses all the motions available to the creature on stage to express the situation. Chuck Jones at his best is Wile E. Coyote fiddling with a bear trap.
But his unit wasn't just Chuck Jones. Michael Maltese consistently developed some excellent dialog (which is brilliance of the duck/rabbit season) , and Maurice Noble's outrageous minimalist backgrounds are truly outstanding (later Road Runners, Duck Dodgers, and so on). Of course, from the early fifties on, Milt Franklin took over the music for Chuck's unit, and he never had quite the repertoire that Carl Stalling did. Anything Jones did before 1940 pretty much sucks though.
Tex Avery was just wild, and is rightly considered a true genius of the art; some of the best cartoons in absolute are his.
Bob Clampett comes close to capturing Tex's absurdity -- he did some real howlers before switching to television (first with a puppet show, then with "Cecil the Sea Sick Sea Serpent").
Frank Tashlin's limited animated oeuvre demonstrates a concern for rendering space and off-the-wall camera angles that makes for good cartoons, but also explains his successful transitiion to live-action films.
Friz Freleng's work is a little uneven. Sometimes he's uninspired -- like when he took the Jones Duck Season/Rabbit Season to the TV set for three in the fifties; but often it's high-quality, stripped-down gags with impeccable timing.
I always considered the Pixar of the Hollywood Cartoon to be the directorial teamof Hanna and Barbera; They work, while serviceable, is just uninspired; the only original touch they leave is a rather disturbing anal fixation.
