What's Opera, Doc? (1957)
🎬 What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)
Directed by Chuck Jones. Runtime about 6 min.
| Director | Chuck Jones |
| Year | 1957 |
| Runtime | about 6 min |
| Where I watched it | Streaming, widely available |
I came for Bugs in a Viking helmet and stayed for the backgrounds. Animation Obsessive’s essay convinced me the film belongs as much to its designer, Maurice Noble, as to Jones. Every unnatural color and impossible shadow in it was a deliberate experiment, and the crew knew they were watching something unusual while the paint was still wet.
This was a workaday production that stole its own budget. At $35,510, nearly $430,000 today, over seven weeks instead of the standard five, the short was formally just another Bugs Bunny cartoon. Jones’s crew secretly shaved weeks off easier films and faked their time cards to fund it. The managers, Jones said, were “not very bright” and never caught on. Masterpieces sometimes start as expense fraud.
The craft overload is measurable. A pre-recorded complex score, movement studied from ballet stars Riabouchinska and Lichine, almost 500 pose sketches from Jones plus 1,500 unused roughs against the usual 300, and 106 shots squeezed into six minutes. Nobody spends like that on a cartoon they expect to forget.
Noble’s doctrine was that backgrounds are drama, not decoration. Color and visual impact exist to land story points; no background is good unless it fits the mood. Jones’s gloss on it is the line I keep coming back to: a great designer builds an arena where the performer shows to best advantage, and the film would have been cluttered except that it was so well designed.
The look came from throwing out the first direction. Ernie Nordli’s original treatment was stagey, all proscenium arch. Noble scrapped it for super-grand opera: colossal settings over the top enough to spoof opera itself, riffing on the Kimberly Crest mansion he had referenced on Disney’s Fantasia, which this film satirizes. The opening Night on Bald Mountain gag says it in one image: a tiny character before a gigantic shadow.
Then came the experiments that made professionals nervous. A red Elmer against a purple sky, which sent Friz Freleng muttering “what the hell” out of Noble’s office and made ink-and-paint call to confirm they were really painting it that way. A spotlight effect built by punching a hole in blue celluloid and arguing a cameraman into a double exposure. Noble’s own verdict on the method: sometimes experiments backfire, and that is what kept the job interesting.
Nobody called it a masterpiece at the time, which is my favorite part. Submitted for an Oscar, not nominated. Press mostly silent, except Motion Picture Exhibitor guessing it would play art houses, “believe it or not.” It earned its reputation the slow way, rerunning on television until side-by-side comparison made the extra obvious. Jones eventually called it their most elaborate and satisfying production.
Worth your time if: you love animation craft or want six minutes that repay pausing. Skip it if opera parody with a cross-dressing rabbit sounds like homework rather than joy.
Related TMFNK Content
- Moving Image Archive: Search a Century of Footage by Describing the Shot The same century of film as searchable fragments, where this cartoon survives as a whole.
- Moody Science Classics: The Complete 20-Film Collection Mid-century educational films from the same era of serious craft in supposedly minor formats.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺