Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc?

Since I've recently been discussing the fate of classical music (see this post, and this one too) I've decided to jump this post from March of 2012 to the top of the queue. Why? Because one thing that happened to classical music is that its techniques and devices have been put to use in crafting music for the soundtracks of films, including cartoons. In the case of What's Opera, Doc extracts from Wagner operas were used.

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What's Opera Doc from 2K HistoryClips on Vimeo.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that What’s Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made. It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney’s Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The production was, by Warner Brother’s standards, lavish, and the layouts, by Maurice Noble, are inspired.

All of that’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is that the film plays on the nature of reality in a way that’s reminiscent of Dance of the Hours from Disney's Fantasia. As I’ve argued in Animal Passion? Hyacinth Hippo and Ben Ali Gator, that episode depicts the inability of animal dancers to stay in role with the result that, when Ben Ali Gator courts Hyacinth Hippo we don’t know whether they’re acting roles or whether their passion is, well, real. Something like that is going on in What’s Opera, Doc? Elmer Fudd is in role as, well, Siegfried I guess, from beginning to end, but Bugs is not.

Note: I’m not going to comment on the design. But you should pay attention to it. Note the colors, the camera angles, and the use of lines. It’s really exquisite.

Kill the Wabbit

Let’s start at the beginning. As the title card and credits roll we hear an orchestra warming up. We thus know that, yep, as the title says, this is going to be opera. The opening music is wild and stormy and we see a stormy sky, and then a large hulking shadow appears projected against a cliff. More sky and lightening, and then we see that the large shadow is projected by a rather small fellow:

It this point a simple, and rather old, point has been made: things aren’t always what they seem to be. The camera zooms in and it’s Elmer Fudd, in heroic costume as a Nordic warrior, informing us that he’s “hunting wabbits.”

 

As Elmer sings “Kill the wabbit” while poking his spear into a rabbit hole, Bugs hears him and is rather distressed. Bugs approaches and delivers his classic line, “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs, however, is not in costume and so not, presumably, in role. He’s just Bugs.

For whatever reason, Elmer is completely oblivious to the identity of this character, which has us, the audience, wondering what indeed is up? When Bugs asks the mighty Nordic warrior just how he expects to kill the rabbit, Elmer replies that he’ll use his spear and magic helmet. The spear, of course, is just a standard weapon, the Nordic warrior equivalent of Elmer’s more usual shotgun. But a magic helmet, that’s something else entirely and gives the Nordic warrior powers that Elmer never had. Note how the helmet glows when Elmer mentions it:

Perhaps sensing a challenge, Elmer offers to demonstrate the helmet’s powers and climbs to the top of a tall promontory and summons up foul weather in a scene reminiscent of the dream sequence from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Lightening strikes a tree next to Bugs, who’s OK. But he starts running.

It’s then, when they’re far apart, then Elmer realizes that that creature, that’s the wabbit!

Desire and Causality in Road Runner Cartoons

An old one from 2011 that I'm bumping to the top in general principle.

What’s the Road Runner series about?

The cartoons adhere to a formula: They’re set in a desert landscape in the southwestern US and have just two characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Coyote is hungry; Road Runner is a (potential) meal. Coyote concocts schemes to catch Road Runner; some of these are elaborate; and some use equipment procured from the Acme Corp. All the schemes fail. Coyote has no particular animosity toward the Road Runner; nor Road Runner toward Coyote, though he does taunt him. The end.

Simple. But what’s it about? Take Coyote as a figure for human desire and Road Runner as a figure for the world at large. Desire wishes to bend the world toward its ends. All those elaborate, but failed, schemes are a figure for causality. Conclusion: causality operates according to laws that are independent of human desire. Ergo, there is a world out there, and it is independent of us.

Let’s consider an early example in the series, Beep, Beep (1951). Chuck Jones, the director, invokes a scientific frame of mind at the very beginning by giving us the scientific designations of the protagonists:

Jones enforces the sense of “science” by first presenting us with a blueprint for one of Coyote’s schemes:

We, of course, occupy the Coyote’s point of view; he’s a stand-in for us, and our desires. Notice the three-part explication of the plan. There’s a bit of a gap between steps two and three as a number of unnamed things must happen to transform a (presumably) squashed Road Runner into a burger. We might think of that gap as a figure for the gap between desire and reality.

Warner Brothers Stars: Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck

Another working paper. Download from Academic.edu: https://www.academia.edu/14629094/Warner_Brothers_Stars_Bugs_Bunny_Road_Runner_Daffy_Duck

Abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Abstract: Chuck Jones believed in the “disciplines” one had to maintain for a cartoon, the constraints within which one acted. In the Road Runner cartoons, no one talked, though there could be signage, the action always centered on two, and only two, characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and it always takes place in the outdoors in the American Southwest. These cartoons play with reality and engage in a guessing game with the audience in doing so. What’s Opera, Doc? goes beyond a string of gags end engages in a story about the relationship between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Finally Daffy Duck and Porky Pig venture into space in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, which satirizes incompetence and self-generating conflict.

Introduction: Cartoons are for kids, NOT! 3

Road Runner 5

Uh Oh! Hosni Mubarak and Wile E. Coyote 5

Desire and Causality in Road Runner Cartoons 7

Reason in the Social Mind: Road Runner II 16

Bugs in Drag 22

Method in Cartoonology 22

Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc? 23

Elmer Loves Bugs Redux 33

What’s Up between Cartoonist and Audience? 42

Duck Dodgers and Some Gags into the Unknown 44

Duck Dodgers Instructs His Pupil 44

Life Lessons 48

Words and Things 49

And the Larger Issues? 52

Introduction: Cartoons are for kids, NOT!

I’ve been trying to think of something engaging and insightful to say about the cartoons I’m covering in this post – three Road Runners, a Bugs and Elmer, and a Daffy and Porky – and am drawing a blank. The little gray cells are protesting that they’ve been working too hard. So I’m thrown back on the obvious.

Cartoons are for kids1 NOT!

Not when these cartoons were made. They were made for the general movie-going audience. They were made to be shown before a feature film, also made for the general audience.

I suppose that I could then pose the question: What makes these cartoons worthy of adult attention? Wrong question.

We might be better off asking what makes an adult worthy of these cartoons? The answer to that seems obvious: That the adult be alive, awake, and curious about the world. What these cartoons do is play with reality and in so doing reveal our assumptions about it.

I was drawn to the Road Runner cartoons because of what their director, Chuck Jones, calls their “disciplines”, the rules that each cartoon must follow. The Road Runners are among the most disciplined cartoons ever made. Or, perhaps more accurately, their disciplines are among the most austere.

They involve only two characters, the Road Runner and his nemesis, Wile Coyote. There is only one plot, if it is even that: the coyote chases the road runner and fails to catch him. The setting is always the same: the desert of the American Southwest. And there is no dialogue, though there may be writing in signs and such. That’s it.

And from those simple constraints Chuck Jones spun cartoon after cartoon. What makes them work is the gags. And the gags work on two levels. Within the cartoon Wile Coyote is always being outfoxed even as he attempts to trap Road Runner. Sometimes he’s outfoxed by Road Runner and sometime it’s just the nature of things that outfoxes him. But the nature of things in Cartoonland isn’t quite so regular is in the real world.

And that brings in the second level of operation, where the cartoons play with us. Coyote rarely suspects that he’s about to be fooled. We always suspect it, but never know just how. The gag’s always on us.

Of course, all these cartoons work the same way. But the others under examination here also allow dialog. And yet they are still austere. Compare any of these to an episode of The Simpson’s. To be sure, those episodes run 22 minutes or so rather than six or seven, but that alone doesn’t account for the proliferation of characters and dialog. It’s a different regime at work.

The Bugs and Elmer cartoon has only those two characters, unless you count the rotund horse that bugs rides for a bit. What’s Opera, Doc? is perhaps the most lavish cartoon Chuck Jones ever produced. It’s a satire of classical music, Wagner in particular, but also of Disney’s Fantasia. For example, there are shots reminiscent of Chernobog from Night on Bald Mountain. But whereas the large looming figure in the Disney was a devil, albeit a tragic one, the large looming figure in What’s Opera, Doc? is Elmer Fudd’s shadow.

Elmer’s after Bugs, as he always is. But this time he gets him, or at least Bugs allows him to think he’s gotten him. What’s more Bugs plays in this cartoon in two ways. Elmer is in Nordic warrior drag from beginning to end. But when Bugs first appears he’s simply Bugs Bunny and, as such, is not a player in the music drama that has captured Elmer. Then Bugs puts on a costume and inserts himself into the drama where Elmer serenades him in that role. Is Elmer revealing a hidden bond with Bugs? If not, then why is he distraught when he believes that he has finally killed Bugs? Why isn’t he happy in his triumph?

There is there more to this cartoon that meets the eye. It’s an odd tale of unrequited love, Elmer for Bugs. Or, rather, it’s a distortion of such a tale.

Finally, we have Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, with Marvin the Martian as the villain. Is suppose I was drawn to this cartoon because of the science fiction premise – it has Daffy was using a transporter a decade and a half before Kirk and Spock. And it plays on an important motif in popular culture: the incompetence of those in power. Daffy is captain of a spaceship while Porky is his cadet crewman. Daffy is utterly incompetent while Porky is not. Porky gets Daffy out of a jam, twice, but is unable to save him from utterly destroying the planet they set out to find.

It is tempting to see this cartoon as a foretelling of the space race and missile race that would characterize relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, but it has the themes nailed cold: the pursuit of a distant and largely pointless objective (a planet rich in an ingredient for shaving cream), the incompetence of the high and mighty, and the dangers of pointless technical mumbo-jumbo. Did Chuck Jones and his team foresee all that in 1952 when they made this cartoon?

But then, did they have to foresee it at all? Isn’t all that intrinsic to life in the modern world? They simply looked and reported what’s already there. It’s reality that took things out of control.

Dumbo Interlude: The Bear That Wasn’t

As I was working on Dumbo it became clear that I needed to know more about the emergence of “funny animals” cartoons. While Akira Lippit’s insights from the end of Electric Animal (which showed up in the post Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric) were on the mark I wanted more, that is, more specifically about animation history.

I think I found, if not IT (such ITs are never really found, are they?), at least something that promises to be very useful. It’s The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (2009), by Paul Wells. The title’s promising and so is the book. I’ve read through a very interesting introduction and hit pay dirt in the first paragraph of the first chapter, “The Bear Who Wasn’t: Bestial Ambivalence.”

Here’s that paragraph:

In Chuck Jones’s adaptation of Frank Tashlin’s children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t . . . a bear emerges out of hibernation into a Metropolis-style factory, where he is viewed as “a silly man, who needs a shave, and wears a fur coat.” Though he maintains he is a bear, his protestations are ignored and he is put to oppressive, repetitive work in the factory, until he too denies his own identity. Finally, reminded of his intrinsic place in the natural order by the passing of a flock of migrating geese and the onset of autumn, he escapes the human world and goes back to hibernation. Tashlin’s pessimistic tale was written in 1946, and in its depiction of an inhumane hierarchy of foremen, managers, vice-presidents, and presidents, and even downbeat zoo animals, it shows a hopeless view of humankind as it seeks to rebuild the postwar world.

Now, we don’t have a factory in Dumbo, but as I pointed out in Dumbo as Myth 2.2: Machines and Fordism, the factory method of repetitive production is alluded to at the beginning of the Pink Elephants episode where elephant after elephant after elephant parades by, as though they came off an assembly line; and, of course, that episode ends with elephants transforming themselves into machines (cars, trains, and motorboats). Similar, Fordism lurked in Fantasia behind those repetitive brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Sight and Sound in Long-Haired Hare

Just a quick note on Long-Haired Hare, a 1948 Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Chuck Jones. No screen shots. Sorry.

The premise, as you may recall, is a simple one. Bugs is hanging out in his hole happily singing a song. Not so far away Giovanni Jones, an operatic tenor, is practicing. He hears Bugs, is annoyed, he clobbers Bugs, Bugs gets revenge. The End.

Now, it’s not merely that he hears Bugs while he’s trying to practice. The music Bugs is playing actually invades his body so that he sings the tune Bugs is singing and he moves to the beat. He can’t help himself. Bugs doesn’t know that Jones exists. He’s singing for his own pleasure.

So, as I said, he clobbers Bugs. Bugs declares war. And shows up at Jones’s concert that evening. After pestering Jones in this and that way, Bugs dresses up as Leopold Stokowski and mounts the podium. He destroys the baton the conductor had handed him, as Stokowski never used a baton. He conducted with his hands.

And so Bugs proceeds to conduct Jones with his hand. He raises his hand; Jones ascends. He lowers his hand; Jones descends. He holds his hand high in the air; Jones holds a high note. Bugs keeps his hand up there, at one point removing his hand from his glove and allowing the glove to stay up all by itself; Jones keeps holding the note until he falls over.

Duck Dodgers and Some Gags into the Unknown

Since last week’s post, What’s Up Between Cartoonist and Audience? I’ve been thinking about the fact that so many (most? almost all?) Golden Age cartoons are constructed with gags. We all know this, and yet, I must confess, that I for one don’t know what’s going on. What are these things, these gags? How do they work, why should we take such pleasure in a sequence of them? And why did they come to occupy such a large place in popular culture when they did?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I do know something about how to describe and analyze cartoons. I can at least take a look at some more cartoons and see how they work. As for those large questions, they’ll just have to wait.

Duck Dodgers Instructs His Pupil

Let’s take a look at Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, a 1952 Chuck Jones cartoon featuring Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers and Porky Pig as his space cadet sidekick. The earth is running out of Illudium Phosdex, the essential ingredient in shaving cream, and Duck Dodgers is sent to claim the only remaining source, on Planet X. And Planet X is in a zone that’s simply marked “unknown” on a huge space chart—notice that Daffy and his boss are standing on a podium high up in the room, which is itself on the 17,000th floor of the building. Daffy accepts the mission, of course.

Those who’ve been through middle school algebra are likely to pick up some resonance at this point, for the mysterious UNKNOWN in an equation is typically represented by a variable labeled “X”. X is the unknown, and that’s where the hapless Daffy is going with the help of Porky.

Elmer Loves Bugs Redux

In my previous post on What’s Opera, Doc? I’d hit upon the idea that when, nearing the end, Elmer called upon all the forces at his command to destroy Bugs he was motivated by Bugs’ deception.* He’d sung and danced his love to and with Brünnhilde and she turned out to be Bugs in drag. It’s that disappointment, that frustrated love, that drove him into a rage. And that’s different from, in addition to, the almost pro forma antagonism that drove him at the beginning of this cartoon and that drives him at the beginning of all his encounters with Bugs.

I’d liked that idea when I had it, which was in the process of writing that post, but afterward I had some misgivings. For I’d long felt that one good answer—perhaps the best answer—to the question “Why’d he do it?” is: Because the author made him do it. The author wanted to achieve a certain effect, and having the character do whatever, that’s the way to achieve that effect.

So, what’s the immediate effect of Elmer’s remorse? Surprise! That’s not what we were expecting.

And that, of course, is what goes on in the typical Bugs and Elmer cartoon. It’s a game in which the cartoonist keeps us guessing about how Bugs which trick Elmer and keeps surprising us with new gags. Just as Bugs’ (apparent) death was a new move, so is Elmer/Nordic warror’s (real) remorse.

With that in mind, let’s reconsider What’s Opera, Doc?

Reason Harnesses the Social Mind: Road Runner II

Let’s return to Beep, Beep, the Road Runner cartoon I’d examined Saturday. I want to take up a motif I’d noticed, but passed over.

As I indicated, one series of gags takes Coyote and Road Runner into an old cactus mine, where both wear lamped miner’s helmets. As the chase comes to a close, they enter a zigzagging passage which eventually splits, with Road Runner taking the upper passage:

Coyote takes the lower passage, but continues his zigzag course, bouncing off the ceiling:

He comes to rest in a dark passage:

Uh Oh! Hosni Mubarak and Wile E. Coyote

I’ve been so busy doing one thing and another that I haven’t had time to make any substantial posts, not one doing a wrap-up on Porky in Wackyland, nor one on anything else.

And that includes the situation in Egypt. But I saw an Al-Jeezera clip that suggested a way to combine Looney Tunes and the Egyptian revolution into a single post. The clip involves a discussion between Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar, and Slavoj Žižek, philosophical provocateur. Žižek suggested that Mubarak is facing a situation covered by one of the best-known laws of cartoon physics: A character who is suspended in space will remain in suspension only until he realizes that fact. Once he realizes that he’s standing on nothing, gravity kicks in.

Žižek’s comment starts a bit after 20:30 in this clip:

Here’s an elaborated example from a Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoon, Zoom and Bored. In this shot Wile Coyote’s situation (not to mention Road Runner's) is obscured by a dust cloud:

Of course, we don’t know what’s going on. For all we know, Wile and Road Runner are standing on solid ground – the default assumption. Now Wile senses that something’s wrong: