Part of Noble's brilliance is his use of strong simple shapes to define the spaces where the animation is to take place. He was able to create unique designs for each film on which he worked. Jones let him develop whatever designs and looks he thought would work best with the animated action being planned for the project.

Noble's layouts in the 1950s avoided the fussy details of Disney and the over-designed look of UPA. He said the look of his layouts were not influenced by what was happening at UPA. Instead they were simply his personal feelings about what would work best with the project on which he was working. He began to feel comfortable at Warners when he "started to design stuff and they liked it." When asked if he designed the amazing landscapes in these films, or if the concepts were those of his background artist Phil de Guard, he said, "I designed everything. I not only gave Phil the layout, but the color sketches as well. I designed the pictures. He had to copy my sky, my colors, everything." In the book Duck Amuck, Chuck Jones calls Maurice Noble the architect and Phil de Guard the builder of the backgrounds in his films.

Noble explained that those wonderfully strange cliffs and pointed spires, with rocks balancing on the tops of them, in Roadrunner cartoons are exaggerations of his childhood memories of the desert. He grew up in New Mexico and visited Monument Valley, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks as a youngster. He said he loved doing desert settings for cartoons. Each time he would do one they would become more exaggerated. He loved to balance big rocks on spires or on top of small ones and said, "I did it for the fun of the thing. It became Roadrunner country."

Noble said, "I'm often asked the question if we knew we were working on great cartoons and the answer is no, we had a job." He looks back on his career and is amazed at the quality of the work Chuck Jones' unit produced, but he maintains that the unit simply thought of their work as a job. He describes the group as "a basic crew of 10 or 12 people who turned out 11 cartoons a year from beginning to end." Noble feels something's been lost in today's approach to animation production, with "too many cooks in the kitchen." He said, "It's silly to have a whole crew develop a picture, then send it over to another crew, with a director who will change things." Noble is currently working with about 10 artists on Noble Tales.

Fond Memories
When asked if he could add to the discussion about where that brilliance came from he said, "I've often said Mike Maltese enjoyed writing the stuff. I can remember watching Chuck chuckling over his drawings - making Daffy do something silly, or insane or insulting. I enjoyed designing the stuff. The animators enjoyed drawing the stuff and Phil enjoyed painting it. It all kind of rubbed off on the audience... We worked like demons."

Later in the interview he returned to the topic of what made their unit great. He said, "Chuck had a great ability to direct his characters. He did all his character sketches." He also praised three animators, Ken Harris, Ben Washam and Abe Levitow, who were capable of understanding Chuck's notes to them on the drawings about timing and other nuances and were able to turn Chuck's ideas into remarkable performances. He is proud that he was part of Jones' small unit and that their work is now recognized as some of the best from the Golden Age of animation.