Le Clapier de Séville

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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!