What's Opera, Doc? c. 1957 : Epic Cartoon Opera

More than almost any other short film in this list, this one needs no introduction. Animation legend Chuck Jones at the height of his creative powers? The final appearance of Elmer Fudd in a Jones-directed cartoon? Bugs Bunny in his best drag performance? A pitch-perfect parody of Richard Wagner’s operas and ballets, the Bugs-and-Elmer formula that had grown kind of stale, and even a send-up of Disney’s Fantasia? There’s no wonder this became the first cartoon selected for the National Film Registry.

The short continued in the vein of Jones’s earlier opera parody, Rabbit of Seville, itself a nod to an earlier Woody Woodpecker short loosely adapting the same opera by Gioachino Rossini. What’s Opera, Doc? was an especially labor-intensive cartoon to make, requiring Jones and his animators to fudge the numbers on their time cards to get it done, claiming the additional weeks were instead allocated toward the easier-to-produce Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. The added time and effort show onscreen. Maurice Noble’s art direction evokes the limited animation style of rival studio UPA to create a world influenced by the horrors of German silent-film expressionism, featuring jagged towers and buildings and sets that simply couldn’t be replicated in live-action even with the highest of budgets. Meanwhile, Dutch angles are used to give the story of Bugs and Elmer’s last stand a scope worthy of Wagner’s grandiose epic.

Then there’s the real star of the show, Bugs’s lapine femme fatale, the pigtailed Brunhilde. For many people, including RuPaul, Bugs Bunny provided a first introduction to drag queens, and the wascally wabbit never did it better than here, riding atop a morbidly obese yet graceful steed as Brunhilde. It is a definitive entry for the character, whose creative life is a subject of a chapter in Jones’s own illustrated autobiography. “Bugs went through a period of wild awkwardness before settling into the self-contained studied attitudes peculiar to him, so that his every movement is Bugs and Bugs only,” Jones wrote. He described What’s Opera, Doc? as one of the final corners turned in that evolutionary process: “Probably our most elaborate and satisfying production.”

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html