Le Clapier de Séville

It's the summer opera out in the mountain air of some nice place where "The barber of Seville" is being presented.....and that's what we get, with Bugs playing the barber and Elmer Fudd his foil.

What Bugs does to this bald-headed little fat guy, all set to the music and lyrics of the famous opera, is brutal. This is a very inventive animated short, where every movement, including tapping fingers, is set to the music.

The skits may not be laugh-out-loud funny but they're clever and it's a different and entertaining. This is a Bugs Bunny cartoon that flies by quickly which means it is pretty darn good.

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.

Classic Looney Tunes short has Bugs and Elmer playing around with the Barber of Seville opera. So many wonderful gags in this one, including the adjustable barber chairs that seem to have no limit to how high they can go, Figaro Fertilizer, and Bugs in señorita drag. Flawless voice work from Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan, although the cartoon is mostly action with little dialogue. The animation is beautiful with great colors and well-drawn characters and backgrounds. It's a cartoon set to a famous opera so obviously the music drives the action. Rossini's music speaks for itself but the lyrics Bugs and Elmer add to it are hilarious. This is yet another feather in the cap of Chuck Jones, the most creative of all the Termite Terrace legends (in my opinion).

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.