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

A still from What’s Opera, Doc?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!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.”1He 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.)2Some 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 300.3Those 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.”4Stills from What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)A snippet of animation from the filmMaurice 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.5Either 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.6In 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.7Storyboards by Mike Maltese for What’s Opera, Doc? — courtesy of Chuck ReducksCharacter layout sketches by Chuck Jones for the film, courtesy of That’s All Folks!A shot in progress. From top left: pencil layout, Noble color key, background painting by Philip DeGuard, final shot. Courtesy of That’s All Folks! and The Noble Approach.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.8Noble 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.”9Noble 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.10Freleng 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.11Noble color design work for the film, courtesy of The Noble ApproachMore Noble color design, courtesy of The Noble ApproachOne 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.Noble thumbnail sketches for the film, courtesy of The Noble ApproachNoble design work, courtesy of The Noble ApproachSeeing 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.12Still, 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.13 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.14The 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.”15 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. 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