Rabbit of Seville

Just about all you can say. This is my opinion is the greatest animated short of all time. Perfectly recreating the opera with about everything you need.

Bugs as the snake charmer has always been my favorite part, especially the music behind it. Genius! And not Wile E. Coyote either, the directors, producers and animators all deserved every award in the books for this one.

What's Opera Doc is another masterpiece, well constructed, and brilliantly done by the animators. But sorry, it ranks second place in my book as it's not as humorous as Rabbit of Seville. can't say much more except it's won=der-ful.

F

Warner Bros. Cartoon Department was a factory that churned out the best cartoon shorts in history over a period of thirty years, over ninety per cent of these cartoons above the level most studios could hope to reach. But if that hadn't been so, if all the hundreds of cartoons that were turned out over the decades were complete crap, "What's Opera, Doc?" would come and give the studio world-wide renown. "Rabbit of Seville" seems to be in the same league. It's one of the handful of cartoons that really has no visible flaws. After repeated viewings (thanks to DVD) I still can't see anything wrong with it. The music and the animation are perfectly synchronized, and might be equal Disney's "Nutcracker Suite" sequence from "Fantasia." The action and the music sometimes get so frantic and so fast that your heart beats 200 times a minute. The gags are perfectly ingenious, nobody thought of those kinds of gags before and they were never repeated. Bugs and Elmer are great actors. No cartoons but possibly "Duck Amuck" and "What's Opera, Doc?" match it. Bugs's songs are fantastic, if you can keep up with the words. Nobody had seen anything like "Rabbit of Seville" before and nobody has seen anything similar since. So many trademarks that seem like Warner Bros. staples now were actually only used in "Seville." It really is unmatched. Beautiful.

I love Bugs Bunny, and this one is just amazing. It cracks me up every time. This is the best, with the Hunting trilogy and the Marvin/Bugs cartoons behind, not close. Number one, just fantastic, 10/10 ***** out of ***** and an emphatic A+++++++!

L.R.

One of the best of the Warner Brothers cartoons. The scenes of Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny during the opera are so brilliantly done with the music. The chase scene with the bigger and bigger weapons is one of the all-time classics.

"Rabbit of Seville" has Elmer Fudd trying to shoot Bugs Bunny, and so the latter leads the former into an opera house where "The Barber of Seville" is about to be performed. Within a minute, Bugs and Elmer are the barber and customer, respectively. Needless to say, Bugs tries a few unsavory experiments on Elmer.

In an interview, Chuck Jones explained how, listening to Bugs sing his own lyrics for the opera (Welcome to my shop/Let me cut your mop/Let me shave your crop), you almost get the impression that the lyrics were written specifically for him. The first time when I ever saw this cartoon when I was really young, I probably thought that, as I didn't know about the original opera. Rossini would be really proud of the whole Chuck Jones/Michael Maltese/Mel Blanc creative team. Excellent.