Rabbit of Seville

This is one of Chuck Jones's masterpieces, an incredible blend of music (mainly opera) and animation. The new lyrics written to the very old and familiar music are priceless, as is the scene where Elmer at first thinks he's starting to grow hair. One of the best cartoons Warner Brothers ever produced. Well worth watching. Most highly and happily recommended!

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).

While chasing Bugs Bunny thru the mountains, Elmer and Bugs happen upon a concert performance of Rossini's opera 'Il barbiere di Siviglia'. Seizing the opportunity to cause major mayhem and trickery, Bugs hijacks the opera for his own wicked plans.

Now Bugs and Elmer are the stars of the show and pain, torture and humiliation come in that order. The animation, timing, music and editing are all absolutely perfect in this cartoon. Surely one of the finest Looney Tune efforts containing all the anarchy, madness and insanity they are famous for plus enough intelligence and cleverness to put a roomful of NASA experts to shame.

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.

Okay, I am not a big fan of Charles Jones later work. I preferred him when he was "Charles M" instead of "Chuck." But this cartoon has persisted to be one of my two favourite episodes of the Looney Tunes characters. There really is nothing poorly done about the entire episode. The script is wonderful and witty, the music subject matter is perfect, and the singing is spot-on (especially for voiced characters). While I feel that "What's Opera, Doc?" is a bit heavy handed, and was never one of my favourites, I will stop what I am doing just to watch the Rabbit of Seville whenever I see that it is on the TV.

If you value culture, or classic cartoons, this one has both. Many people in the West feel that cartoons cannot contain a cultural valuability that allows them to be either serious or even good. Well, I can honestly say that this one, while not serious, is actually a good piece of art, and stands alone well, proving to itself and other cartoons that even without seriousness, a cartoon can be more than kiddy jokes.