Wabbits and Opera

One of the marks of 20th century U.S. art is that its practitioners were not nearly as dogmatic as Europeans at maintaining distinctions between “high art” like painting and ballet and “low art” like circuses and TV. Many of the best artists in the U.S., including comedian Charlie Chaplin, director Preston Sturges and composer Aaron Copland, moved easily between “art” and entertainment.

One of the great masters of writing on multiple levels was animator Chuck Jones, who died at 89 last Thursday at his home in Corona del Mar. Jones’ more than 300 animated films entertained the little ones but also engaged the adults in a sophisticated, vigorous pop culture.

Consider “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Jones’ ambitious six-minute version of Richard Wagner’s 14-hour “The Ring of the Nibelung.” This 1957 spoof was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1992 as one of “the most culturally, historically and aesthetically significant films of our time” because of the sly way it folded slapstick humor into witty jabs at both Teutonic epics and Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.”

Or watch as Bugs Bunny in the 1952 cartoon “Rabbit Seasoning” persuades Elmer Fudd to fire his shotgun at Daffy Duck, not Bugs, even though Daffy has just posted a forest of signs declaring it “Wabbit Season”:

Daffy: Shoot him now! Shoot him now!

Bugs: You keep out of this. He doesn’t have to shoot you now.

Daffy: Aha! Pronoun trouble! It isn’t ‘He doesn’t have to shoot you now.’ It’s ‘He doesn’t have to shoot me now!’ And I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!

Bang!

Elmer blasts Daffy then because, as animation scholar Charles Solomon has pointed out, Bugs has learned how to exploit Daffy’s principal character flaw: He is “clever enough to have some sense of the situation, but too vain to realize that he can’t control it. He lets himself get carried away by his own words and gets his beak shot off again and again.”

Jones was able to create psychologically rich portraits because he loved his characters too much to mock them simplistically. His witty character dialogues inspired modern animators like “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening. And his detailed renderings of subtle human features, like the flicker of an eyebrow that reveals love, a dramatic departure from the overwrought animation traditions of his day, have been held up as a model by the creators of “Samurai Jack,” one of most artistically acclaimed cartoons on the air today.

True to the distinctly American form, Jones’ work had the depth of art and the levity of entertainment. His demise is sad, but as Bugs exclaims at the end of “What’s Opera, Doc?,” “What did you expect--a happy ending?”