Why ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ Looks Like That

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Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan:

1. Maurice Noble’s design for What’s Opera, Doc? (1957).
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Super opera

It’s one of the really famous cartoons. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably watched it yourself. After almost 70 years, What’s Opera, Doc? endures.

Classic status wasn’t exactly the team’s goal. This was, in some ways, a workaday Bugs Bunny production. “What’s Opera, Doc? is one many Europeans adore,” Chuck Jones said in the ‘70s. “They call that my ‘masterpiece,’ which it may or may not be; I didn’t think about it at the time.”

He did know it was a bit ambitious. At a cost of $35,510 (almost $430,000 today), it was spendier than most Warner cartoons. It took seven weeks compared to the standard five. To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)

Some unique features of this project were its complicated score, recorded ahead of time, and its movements studied from ballet stars Tatiana Riabouchinska and David Lichine. Plus, Jones drew “almost 500” pose sketches (“as well as a further 1,500 unused roughs”) to guide his animators, whereas most films got 300.

Those things and others, including the voice performances, made the short special. But Jones liked to credit one element and one person in particular with its success. He pointed to Maurice Noble, designer of the colors and layouts.

What’s Opera, Doc? is a film of “angular settings, gargantuan shadows, rapid cuts, odd colors and dramatic camera angles,” in the words of Charles Solomon. And every shot of it required Noble’s touch. “Without Maurice Noble, who excited, moved and stimulated us all,” Jones wrote, “that film could not have been made.”

Maurice Noble was one of the top mid-century cartoon designers. But he wasn’t a member or a fan of UPA. “I don’t believe I was influenced by UPA at all. ... I think UPA outsmarted itself in overdesigning,” he said. The UPA designers, for their part, didn’t seem to like him, either.

Either way, Noble gave many of Jones’s films a slick, modernist look in the ‘50s. He viewed design as a form of storytelling and adjusted his style to fit each project. “Background design is all about conveying emotion and supporting personality,” Noble once said. Like he told Animato:

I am a great believer in the idea that color and visual impact have a lot to do with the response of the audience. I would play for dramatic impact in both design and color, in terms of putting over a story point. No background is any good unless it’s appropriate to the given situation or mood of the thing that’s being portrayed.

This functional aspect of Noble’s work was something Jones loved and often glowed about:

He had great staging techniques, and he understood what very few background men do understand — and actually very many live-action people don’t seem to understand it in the graphics area: that the purpose of a great designer is to design an arena where the actor can perform. Or the animator can perform. And where the action shows itself to its best advantage. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t have high design. You remember What’s Opera, Doc? — the thing would have been cluttered, except that it was so well designed.

In Jones’s Wagner send-up, the Noble method was especially key. This time, a good deal of the story “had to be told in graphics,” as Jones put it.

Noble wasn’t the first designer attached to the project. It started with Ernie Nordli, who gave What’s Opera, Doc? a stagey treatment with a proscenium arch. When Noble took over, he scrapped that direction in favor of “super-grand opera” with “super, colossal settings,” over-the-top enough to spoof the medium.

Working from storyboards by writer Mike Maltese, Jones roughly outlined the shots through character layouts. Eventually, the film would have over a hundred shots squeezed into roughly six minutes — once again, more than the norm.

Noble excelled at backdrops, while Jones was the stronger artist in figure drawing. They had a collaborative setup here, handing ideas back and forth. “Maurice would trace all the character drawings onto one sheet of paper, then play with the spaces open to him to design the background,” Jones wrote.

Jones then built on that pass. As Noble said, “I would design material and hand it back to him, and he’d weave it back into the story because it hit him right.”

Noble had worked on Disney’s Fantasia — and What’s Opera, Doc? was a kind of “satire of Fantasia,” in Jones’s words. So, Noble riffed on the same Kimberly Crest mansion he’d referenced in the Disney production. And he executed Jones’s idea for a Night on Bald Mountain gag at the start:

I know that toward the opening, he wanted to have this big shadow going. So I did a sketch, and I put the tiny little character down in front of it, to give this gigantic scale. Then I went to the pink roses and the Greek love castle … I was thinking now in terms of dramatic layout and staging for each section of the picture as it went along. It became theatrical; it wasn’t reality.

Noble took an experimental route. That included some of the colors: a red Elmer Fudd against a purple sky, among other unnatural choices. With work underway, Friz Freleng dropped by Noble’s office and saw the concepts. “[He] muttered, ‘What the hell?’ and then just left,” Noble recalled.

Freleng wasn’t the only one confused. “I would get calls from the ink and painting department saying, ‘Now, you don’t mean to say you’re going to paint this character all red?’ or something like that,” Noble explained. “I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s the way we want it.’ And Chuck was backing me up on it.”

Again: What’s Opera, Doc? wasn’t a huge project or meant to change animation. The team did a lot of cartoons each year; this was one of them. In that framework, though, Noble was playing around, trying to put across this satire by way of “ultra-dramatic” choices. “The thing just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” he said.

One of Noble’s many experiments was the spotlight effect in the later scenes, when the edges of the screen go blue. Here’s Noble:

I punched a hole in a piece of blue celluloid one day, and I was experimenting with this stuff, and I saw this made a spotlight. I took it in to the cameraman, and I said, “Why can’t we do something like this?” I argued with him, and I got him to try it under the lens, and we made a spotlight out of it [with a double exposure]. … I was always trying something, and sometimes it would backfire. That’s what kept the job interesting all those years.

When this stuff was coupled with Noble’s usual techniques (like what he called his “rhythmic” compositions of “color and space relationships, and accents in patterns of forms”), What’s Opera, Doc? came out looking pretty special.

Seeing the final film at the studio, the team was impressed. Artist Willie Ito remembered, “[W]e marveled at what a unique feat that was.” The May 1957 issue of Warner’s internal magazine noted that this “very rich looking picture” with “very unusual” backgrounds and colors was “very well received” by the crew.

Still, in general, What’s Opera, Doc? wasn’t a big deal. It was just another Bugs Bunny cartoon. Although it was submitted for an Oscar, it wasn’t nominated. The press didn’t say much about it one way or another. Yet one of the few reviews, in Motion Picture Exhibitor, hinted at a reevaluation to come:

This is far above the usual run of animated cartoons and should find special favor in art houses, believe it or not.

The film got a second life on television, according to historian Jerry Beck. What’s Opera, Doc? appeared at the end of the golden age of theatrical animated shorts, but it could rerun forever on TV — many of the older cartoons did. When the Warner films were seen and judged side by side, Beck said, this one clearly stood out. It had something extra, different.

It stood out to its creators, too. “I’ve always loved that cartoon,” Noble noted. Jones later called it “probably our most elaborate and satisfying production.” Stylistically, the film was a big swing that paid off. Noble was the first to admit that some of his other swings, across his career, hadn’t. Like he said, though:

Sometimes when you experiment you will fail. Some way-out ideas may not work the way you thought they would. But that’s okay! That’s the nature of being on the edge of exciting design. You will never do anything interesting if you don’t take chances.

2. Newsbits

We lost Tim Curry (80) and Peter Cullen (85), two major voice actors in animation. There’s a wonderful write-up about both of them on re:frame.
Coyote vs. Acme debuted in second place at the American box office, with $15.4 million in revenue and a CinemaScore audience rating of A.
The upcoming book Nizo Yamamoto: Art for Animation collects the work of the great Japanese background artist. It’s the first English book about him, done by the folks behind Anime Architecture.
In America, Phil Tippett’s studio just closed with a massive auction, after almost 40 years in business.
The Palestinian rap group BLTNM started an animated series on YouTube, produced by the studio Stereo.
A film by Ukrainian director Volodymyr Dakhno, behind the Cossacks series, has been restored and will screen at the Linoleum festival next month.
In America, Amid Amidi revealed details about his immense, heavily illustrated Ward Kimball biography, which is nearly complete and scheduled to hit Kickstarter next year.
In Japan, Toyo Keizai investigates the reality that late-night anime is now tailored mainly to the tastes of foreign countries, especially those in North America, where most of the industry’s money is made.
An in-depth behind-the-scenes video about the Japanese series Jaadugar is up on YouTube.
In Russia, there’s been a large uproar over a police crackdown on a girl’s playground drawings of the characters from KikoRiki, an animated series. The company behind KikoRiki responded by inviting her for a studio visit.
Finally: a look into The Good Soldier Švejk (1954–1955) by Jiří Trnka.

3. Last word

That’s our issue for today! Hope you’ve enjoyed. We’re closing out with personal comments from the two of us:

John: The loss of Curry and Cullen, and the end of Phil Tippett’s studio, were tough headlines to read this week. Those are all major legacies, and I’m left wondering about the future. A friend messaged me that Tim Curry was one of those irreplaceable people, a type who isn’t even made anymore. I think about the path he took and whether the infrastructure exists now for people to do what he did. The masters are getting older, and all of us in the younger generations are on next. Even if they’re impossible acts to follow, we owe it to them to try somehow.

Jules: The control and depth of Curry’s voice performances are things I associate with actors of his generation, many of whom had education and experience in live theater. So many things go into the formation of artists: the traditions they’re trained in, the prevailing taste and artistic theories of the moment, the economic incentives around them, the projects available to work on, the other artists they happen to meet. Like how Hayao Miyazaki was so heavily formed by his peers, whether in his early years in the Toei union or during his TV work with Takahata. Sometimes it can feel like artists in previous eras benefited from circumstances that have long since changed. Whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves in today, I believe that serious discussion, study, analysis and collaboration can go a long way in helping us keep up.

Until next time!

From Funnyworld (Spring 1971).

Details from Bugs Bunny: Fifty Years and Only One Grey Hare, Of Mice and Magic and Chuck Reducks. That last one was a major source today.

See Hollywood Cartoons and the documentary Wagnerian Wabbit, both used multiple times.

Quotes from Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation and The Noble Approach. The latter was one of our main sources.

See Animato (Spring 1991), used many times, and Cartoon Modern.

From Chuck Jones Conversations, used a few times.

See Tunes for ‘Toons and Stepping into the Picture.

The exact number of shots is given as 106 in The 50 Greatest Cartoons.

See Noble’s interview in Walt’s People (Vol. 25), a key source.

See Cartoon Research and That’s All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation.

From Film Comment (January–February 1975), used a few times.