Love – Elmer’s weakness to Bugs’ mock lust.Ĭolor – Action (Elmer’s demigod powers) and emotion (example: Elmer’s rage when controlling the weather to kill Bugs and his grief when he thinks that he has done so). Power – Elmer controlling the weather, Bugs’ power to stop Elmer in his tracks. “In 1943, while the classical music and animation communities were still buzzing about Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Warner Brothers decided to tilt that conversation in their favor they began to release animated shorts parodying Fantasia‘s use of classical music.” įantasia is serious, beautiful and artistic, in contrast to What’s Opera, Doc?, which is comedic, stylized and exaggerated. “This 1957 epic satirises the grand tradition of Viking opera and also manages to rib an entire century of ballet in the process.” – quote from Warner Brothers Animation Art by Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will. What’s Opera, Doc? was released on July 6, 1957, and has been praised by many animation historians as one of Warner Brothers’ best animated short films and one of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time. Jones’ production staff spent six times the amount of labor working on the cartoon, with him telling them to cheat on their time cards in order to convince the higher-ups that they were making Road Runner cartoons. The voices were provided by Mel Blanc (Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd yelling, “SMOOOOOG!!!”) and Arthur Q. Michael Maltese wrote the cartoon’s story and the lyrics to Wagner’s music to create Bugs and Elmer’s song “Return My Love”, while Maurice Noble devised the stylized backgrounds. During the six minutes of What’s Opera, Doc?, Jones also satirizes the contemporary style of ballet, Richard Wagner’s ponderous operatic style, and the standard Bugs-and-Elmer formula, which was clichéd at the time. In response to this, Warner Brothers decided to compete with them, producing and releasing shorts like Bunny of Seville and What’s Opera, Doc? to focus more on parody than pomp, with Jones as the director. The Walt Disney Company’s Fantasia is a 1940 musical anthology film in which different animated segments are set to classical tunes, with the actions in sync to the music. For example, William Hogarth used engraving and printing in his work to tell stories and make fun of the upper class and politics. Thanks to artistic processes such as engraving and carving, the printing process was exposed to the masses. Humor has been used in narrative-based, sequential cartoons since the invention of the printing press. This is relevant today, because political figures, such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, are vulnerable to being satirized by comedians and artists. This reflected the mindset of Americans at the time.Īt Warner Brothers, Chuck Jones (who had been working at the studio since the 1930s) was directing a lot of cartoons around 1957, including Scrambled Aches, Ali Baba Bunny, Go Fly a Kit and Boyhood Daze, most of which involved underdog characters taking the mickey out the people supposedly in charge and making them look like fools. These films are relevant and contextualize What’s Opera, Doc? as the audience would be going to see the cartoon’s screening before these feature films, in which we recognize a recurring theme of the underdog triumphing over the more controlling figures. DeMille and starring Charlton Heston), Around the World in Eighty Days (a light-hearted adventure film directed by Michael Anderson), 12 Angry Men, Jailhouse Rock (an underdog film based on the song of the same name by and starring Elvis Presley), The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Three Faces of Eve. The most popular films of the 1950s that people saw were The Ten Commandments (an epic religious drama directed by Cecil B. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 came into force that year. The United States of America and Britain were still recovering from the Second World War, the former country being full of political unrest. Satire Season, Tragedy Season: The Historical Context of What’s Opera, Doc? Image © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.
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