Chuck Jones | What's Opera, Doc? / 1957 [animated cartoon]

 

a night at the opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Maltese (screenplay and lyrics), Chuck Jones (director) What's Opera, Doc? / 1957 [animated cartoon]

 

Perhaps the best cartoon ever made, or at least one of the greatest and most popular, Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera Doc? dares to turn the lisping Elmer Fudd into one of opera’s greatest lovers Siegfried while transforming Bugs Bunny into the love of Siegfried’s life, Brünnhilde.

     Dressed in magic gold helmet, armor, and spear, Elmer follow’s Bugs’ footsteps while singing from "Ride of the Valkyries"—his version, “Kill the wabbit!” Bugs challenges him, in an operatic mini-aria that ends in a musical version of his famed “what’s up?” to which Elmer replies, leaping to the highest mountain top in a remarkable abstract montage of color and cartoon art, that he is now powerful and invincible and intends to do Bugs in.

    Elmer is soon stopped midtrack, however, as he encounters Bugs now in drag, performing as the beautiful Valkyrie Brünnhilde while lying on the vast body of a white stallion. Together, for most of the cartoon, in fact, Siegried and Brünnhilde sing of their love, Bugs as Brünnhilde also now performing the Venusberg ballet from Wagner’s Tannhäuser.

  As Elmer sweeps her up for a deep, loving kiss, Bugs’ wig falls off, revealing his true identity, which—as often occurs in Bugs Bunny cartoons—utterly infuriates Elmer. Once again, he has been tricked. But in this case, under the visor of the golden helmet, he is no longer helpless, calling down upon earth torrents of rain, lightning, and earthquakes. A storm quickly brews, tearing up the mountains into which Bugs has escaped.

  But immediately upon spotting the rabbit, dead, Elmer regrets his wrath, carrying off the cold body to Valhalla, Bugs briefly awakening only to turn to the camera and address us: “Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”

   In it’s wonderful visuals and its playful parody of everything from opera, ballet, the Disney cartoon Fantasia, and the Bugs-and-Elmer cartoons themselves, director Chuck Jones and his crew stole time from other productions and even other cartoons in order to create what he himself described as “our most elaborate and satisfying production.”

    Jones never again directed an Elmer Fudd cartoon.

    In a 2016 essay, “How Bugs Bunny and ‘Kill the Wabbit’ Inspired a Generation of Opera Stars,” The Wall Street Journal writer Michael Phillips catalogued comments from many opera stars and others involved in the opera world declaring that it was their childhood experience with this work and other’s such as Warner Brothers’ earlier Rabbitt of Seville in which they first encountered opera and were, thereafter, drawn to the musical form. And most of the transgender men and women actors interviewed in Sam Feder’s 2020 documentary Disclosure agree that one of the most important cinematic moments to them while growing up was Bugs Bunny’s transformation into Brünnhilde. If Bugs could make such a vast transformation, why couldn’t they?

    In 1992, the United States Library of Congress inducted this film into its National Film Registry.

 

Los Angeles, March 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).