General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Rabbit of Seville

Rabbit of Seville is a 1950 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Chuck Jones, in which Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd stage their own comic version of Gioachino Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville after Elmer chases Bugs into a Hollywood Bowl concert performance of the opera.¹^•² The eight-minute film is built around Rossini's overture, with the slapstick action timed to the music, and it is one of the best-known pairings of classical music with American animation.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	December 16, 1950 (United States), as a Looney Tunes short from Warner Bros.¹^•²
Director	Chuck Jones (credited as Charles M. Jones); story by Michael Maltese⁵^•¹³
Voices	Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny; Arthur Q. Bryan as Elmer Fudd (uncredited)⁵
Music	Carl W. Stalling, musical director and conductor, using Rossini's Overture to The Barber of Seville⁵^•⁴
Runtime and rating	8 minutes; rated G³
Setting	Backstage and onstage at an idealized Hollywood Bowl, where The Barber of Seville is on the bill³^•⁶
Standing	Ranked #12 in a 1994 poll of animation professionals of the 50 greatest animated shorts⁶

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The short opens behind the Hollywood Bowl stage, where a production of The Barber of Seville is about to begin. Bugs Bunny flees into the backstage area with Elmer Fudd in close pursuit. Bugs raises the curtain on Elmer, trapping him on stage in front of the audience, and as the orchestra begins playing Bugs takes the role of the barber, subjecting Elmer to an elaborate grooming he will not forget.³

The chase premise is the standard Bugs-and-Elmer hunt formula, transplanted onto an opera stage. The action runs through a series of barber-shop gags, including the famous sequence in which Bugs tosses a salad on Elmer's head in time to the overture, and a dueling sequence performed on rising and falling hydraulic barber chairs.⁴^•⁶ The film ends with a wedding scene in which Elmer unexpectedly appears in a wedding dress while Bugs plays the groom.⁷

Music and synchronization

Carl Stalling, Warner Bros.' musical director, built the score from an arrangement of Rossini's The Barber of Seville (1815), with music and image synchronized and imitating each other at many moments.⁵^•⁸ Writer Michael Maltese created new lyrics that match the action and fit the music, so that the slapstick is paced musically around the overture rather than merely accompanied by it.⁶

The credits appear in "joke" Italian on screen: Eduardo Selzeri for producer Edward Selzer, Michele Maltese for Michael Maltese, and Carlo Jonzi for Charles M. Jones.⁶ The conductor shown leading the orchestra is drawn as a caricature of Leopold Stokowski, a reference to Disney's Fantasia.⁶

Production credits

The animation crew was drawn from Jones's unit at Warner Bros. Cartoons.⁵

Animators: Phil Monroe, Ben Washam, Ken Harris, Emery Hawkins, and Lloyd Vaughan, with Pete Burness uncredited²^•⁵
Layouts: Robert Gribbroek, with Peter Alvarado uncredited²^•⁵
Backgrounds: Philip DeGuard²
Editor and sound effects: Treg Brown (uncredited)⁵
Producer: Edward Selzer (uncredited)⁵
Orchestrator: Milt Franklyn (uncredited)⁵

The SFX Resource wiki notes that although the short was released as a Looney Tunes entry, it "should have been" a Merrie Melodies cartoon, since the musical subject fits that series' name.¹

Place in the Warner Bros. canon

Rabbit of Seville belongs to a group of classically inspired Warner Bros. shorts, alongside Rhapsody Rabbit, A Corny Concerto, Baton Bunnie, and the 1957 Wagner parody What's Opera, Doc?, in which Bugs and Elmer play a Wagnerian Brunnhilde and Siegfried.⁴ Where Disney's Fantasia offered fairly straight renditions of the classics, the Warner Bros. directors, Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng among them, treated the same material irreverently.⁴ A True Classics retrospective describes What's Opera, Doc? as functioning both as parody of and homage to its musical source, while Rabbit of Seville concentrates more on generating laughs.⁹

The short has also been read through performance theory. Eric Savory, a scholar of narrative and queer theory, argues in "The signifying rabbit" (Narrative, 1995) that the film presents situations of parody and allusion in which transvestic performance, inflected through camp, participates in what he calls a queer mode of phallic divestiture; the Queer Animation digital exhibit records the film's two drag instances, Bugs as a flirtatious woman and Elmer in a wedding dress.¹⁰^•⁷

Reception and later releases

In a 1994 poll of animation professionals ranking the 50 greatest animated shorts of all time, Rabbit of Seville placed at number 12; the same critic's survey places What's Opera, Doc? at number 1.⁶ The short holds an IMDb rating of 8.4 from about 6,200 votes.³

The short received a Blue Ribbon reissue on January 18, 1969, and has been restored for home video, appearing on the Looney Tunes Complete Platinum Collection DVD (2023), the Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection Blu-ray (2020, with commentary by animator Eric Goldberg), Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny Golden Carrot Collection (2020), Looney Tunes: Parodies Collection (2020), and Looney Tunes Musical Masterpieces (2015).¹¹ Its music has also been performed live: the touring program Bugs Bunny on Broadway screened Warner Bros.' classically inspired shorts with a 50-piece orchestra, and the successor Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II features the Barber of Seville excerpts from the short.⁴^•¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026