The Story of One Rabbit's Struggle

In the classic Warner Brothers cartoon "Bugs Bunny Rides Again," everyone's favorite wabbit is a bit more wascally than you might remember. In the course of a few minutes, Bugs rolls a cigarette, artfully dodges Yosemite Sam's bullets, and follows a trainload of scantily clad women to Miami. This kind of politically incorrect silliness would never be produced and marketed in the nineties.

That's too bad, because the audience at the Brattle Theatre enjoyed every minute of "The Bugs Bunny Film Fest of the Best '97," a compilation of twelve shorts spanning the golden age of Warner Brothers animation. The inspired lunacy of these cartoon masterpieces lies in their simultaneous frivolity and sophistication. This rare combination has preserved the appeal of these cartoons for over half a century and makes them even more valuable in today's wasteland devoid of truly creative programming. Where else have some of the greatest works of classical music been used to score the falling of an anvil?

The merger of Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment has unified the Looney Tunes collection, allowing the Brattle to compose a program that includes the first Bugs Bunny and Tweety and Sylvester cartoons, the first Warner cartoon to win an Oscar and several hilarious Chuck Jones shorts. The festival carefully includes all the famous Looney Tunes phrases--"What's up, Doc?" "I tawt I taw a putty tat!" and "Be vewy, vewy quiet"--but if you listen closely, the cartoons are replete with wry jokes and creative banter.

"The Wild Hare," the first cartoon to star Bugs Bunny, shows the rabbit's evolution. Even in this earliest specimen, though, the style and substance of the Bugs and Elmer cartoons are clearly defined: Bugs takes to cross dressing to fool the wily hunter. "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" was made years later, but is essentially the same cartoon with added finesse. In this update, despite Daffy's attempts to stop Bugs' beguiling banter, Elmer's gun keeps displacing Daffy's break from his head.

Word play figures heavily into all cartoons, and some puns are so bad they're funny, like the placard in the medieval spoof "Knighty Knight Bugs" naming one character "Sir Osis of Liver."

The shorts also jauntily ignore the rules of physics. In "High Diving Hare," Bugs Bunny remains suspended on a floating platform in mid-air. He turns to the viewer and says, "I know this defies the law of gravity, but you see, I never studied law." This tongue-in-cheek, yet outrageous approach creates a comedy so simple and rich that no child or adult should be able to withhold a smile.

Other treats in the festival include the first Twenty and Sylvester cartoon, entitled "Birdy and the Beast." Sylvester looks very primitive in his pre-lisp days. The law of gravity is defied again when Sylvester takes to the air after Tweety, but, true to cartoon tradition, only after he realizes that he is flying does he plummet to the ground.

One of the selections even exhibits distinct elements of post-modernism. If Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of An Author is meta-theater, then "Duck Amuck" is the first meta-cartoon. Daffy is denied scenery, erased, and put through all sorts of animated torture until he demands to know "who is responsible for this!" The perpetrator turns out to be Bugs Bunny, who sits at the animator's table and says to the audience, "Ain't I a stinker?"

The festival ends with a trio of shorts that both exalt and skewer classical music and opera. "Rhapsody Rabbit," "The Rabbit of Seville," and "What's Opera, Doc?" are wonderful, if skewed, introductions to music and theater.

The weakest short in the festival is "Carrotblanca," made in 1995. Compared with the other "classic" cartoons, this "Casablanca" parody is tame, functioning more as a showcase of characters than as a pure comedy. The animators were so busy trying to maximize the cartoon's appeal by working everyone--Bugs, Sylvester, Tweety, Yosemite Sam, People Pew and the others--into a tenminute short that the gags are neglected.

Here's to hoping that even though Bugs has been shamefully toned down and forced to play basketball with Michael Jordan, the classic Looney Tunes shorts will continue to be a quick and hilarious break from reality.