Operation: Rabbit (1952)
Directed by Charles M. Jones
Story by Michael Maltese
Animation by Lloyd Vaughan, Ben Washam, Ken Harris, Phil Monroe
Music by Carl Stalling
Prior to the 1952 “Operation: Rabbit,” Bugs Bunny’s foes could be classified in one of four categories: the dimwitted hunter, the hotheaded loudmouth, the pompous authority figure, and the smart-ass who consistently played Bugs for a chump – Cecil Turtle and the gremlin in “Falling Hare” were among the rare detractors who kept getting the best of him.
With “Operation: Rabbit,” a new enemy emerged: a self-proclaimed genius who seeks to obliterate Bugs through intellectual prowess rather than crude brute strength. This character was a coyote that was used in the one-shot 1949 cartoon “Fast and Furry-ous” where he was in wordless pursuit of a grinning and ridiculously fast roadrunner. In “Fast and Furry-ous,” the coyote – who did not have a formal name but was identified in a caption with the mock-Latin genus Carnivorous Vulgaris – attempted to capture his prey in a series of elaborate boobytraps that inevitably backfired on him. For “Operation: Rabbit,” the coyote’s penchant for complicated snares and his shabby appearance were retained while he was given the name Wile E. Coyote and was provided with a supercilious Mid-Atlantic voice.
But whereas Bugs took a jolly, borderline-sadistic pleasure in dealing with the dimwits and hotheads who pursued him, his approach to Wile E. Coyote’s pronouncements of genius was one of annoyance and boredom – he even yawns when the coyote details his superiority at excruciating length. The most brilliant example of Bugs’ irritation with this foe comes when Wile E. Coyote is in a shack on a construction site where he’s filling hollow carrots with nitroglycerin. The coyote is unaware that Bugs placed a rope around the shack, with the rope being attached to a tractor. As Bugs drives the shack to placement on a railroad track ahead of an arriving locomotive, he gives a quick side-eye to the viewer while maintaining a stoic expression. This silent gesture tells the viewer “Yeah, he’s getting what he deserves” without the need for excessive verbiage or even an extra physical movement – the ultimate example of achieving more with less.
Indeed, everything aspect of “Operation: Rabbit” is a mini masterwork that sparkles with (dare we say it?) genius. Whether it involves the coyote’s light humming to himself while planning his strategies or the crisp attention to minor details in the artwork (such as the light shadow created by the coyote’s blueprint on his drawing board) or the inventiveness of Carl Stalling’s orchestrations (the use of strings as the soundtrack to the coyote’s mincing tiptoe pursuit and retreat plus the sampling of “La Vie en Rose” when a sultry female robot coyote is dispatched by Bugs to seduce his new enemy), the creative depth on display is astonishing.
The cartoon also has a sight gag that is among the best in any animated film. When a flying saucer created by Wile E. Coyote to destroy Bugs is manipulated by its intended target to fire on its inventor, the craft soars into the mountain where Wile E. Coyote maintains his laboratory in a ground-level cave. The craft blows up the entire mountain, leaving the coyote standing in shambles in the middle of a jagged ring of scorched earth. With its wonderfully absurd concept (via writer Michael Maltese) and the brilliant visual and audio execution of the segment under Chuck Jones’ direction, “Operation: Rabbit” represents the Warner Bros. animation team at the peak of their powers, with that gag being among their crowning achievements.
Wile E. Coyote would pursue Bugs in a few later cartoons, but none of them had the same imaginative impact as “Operation: Rabbit.” The coyote would go silent when the studio opted to expand the “Fast and Furry-ous” short into a new series with the Road Runner as the prey who constantly flummoxes its boobytrap-happy pursuer – which, of course, began another series of cartoons that gained pop culture immortality.