Rhapsody Rabbit (1946)

Excellent, a Must See

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Most animation fans know, that this title was part of a controversy at the Oscars in 1946. A strinkingly similar Tom and Jerry cartoon THE CAT CONCERTO (1947) was in production simultaneously with this title. Both studios accused each other of plagiarism. A recent investigation into the surviving records of both cartoons suggest that it was a coincidence. But onto the merits of this short.Bugs performs a rendition of List's Hungarian Rhapsody on piano on stage. Freleng had previously used this classical piece as the foundation for the main action in RHAPSODY IN RIVETS (1941). He puts it to excellent use again here. As Bugs performs the piece, he is constantly in battle with a mouse that inhabits the interior of the piano. Eventually the mouse out performs him. As with most of Freleng's music driven shorts of the 40's, there is very little dialog spoken by Bugs, as the music dictates the action as he's performing it. One of the best Bugs Bunny shorts of the 1940's. Freleng did some of the best Bugs shorts during this time frame.

. . . and a Marx Brothers flick broke out? asks RHAPSODY RABBIT. Bugs Bunny brings back some memories for me here, as he spends most of the Warner Bros. animated short playing Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody #2" as a concert pianist. I dropped out of piano lessons just after learning to play a greatly simplified version of the passage Bugs plays with his toes toward the end of this piece. Instead of tackling the next song in my lesson book, I used my freedom from instruction to practice playing my high-tide tune lying on my back with the piano bench perpendicular to the piano keyboard and my hands crossed out-of-sight above and behind my head. But Bugs is able to perform an UNSIMPLIFIED Hungarian Rhapsody using not only his toes, but his teeth and ears, as well. Not only that, but the put-upon hare needs to become his own concert bouncer, user lethal force for the benefit of the properly polite concert-goers. Unfortunately for Bugs, the mouse living in the concert hall piano is a better keyboard wizard than the bunny, butting in to play the most challenging portion of Liszt's signature composition. Being second fiddle to a rodent cannot be very pleasant!

Bugs Bunny is a concert pianist (I said pianist). On his big night he sits to deliver Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody but must overcome a cougher in the audience, distractions in his sheet music, hunger pangs and a troublesome musical mouse living somewhere within in his grand piano.Although this doesn't feature Bugs in the form that I'm used to him (trickery and fooling people) this is still a funny short. The plot makes plenty of imaginative little gags and never runs out of steam. The music is very good and was clearly played by a skilled pianist - it's a shame that Bugs stops us seeing how fast the real pianist's fingers move. The mouse is a good character but it is really Bugs that carries the short.It could easily have been any character in the lead role, but Bugs brings history and weight to the role so it is more than just a lot of piano gags. He delivers the gags well and he interacts well with the audience and the mouse. The animation is not as good as it could have been but there is nothing specifically wrong with it - the same stage and single piano means that it doesn't need a great amount of effort to make it look good.Overall this is a short with a nice simple plot that never leaves the boundary of the piano but still manages to have lots of imaginative gags from that one single device. Great music and funny delivery make for a great cartoon.

A ghoulish mixture of Liszt, murder, violence and carrots, 'Rhapsody Rabbit' is an exuberantly inventive Bugs Bunny cartoon which manages to explode the boundaries of its single setting. Bugs is a famed pianist, the kind of fastidious virtuoso you still find today, but worshipped in the 40s because arrogant eccentricity somehow signalled class. Having removed his many gloves, Bugs, a proto-Glenn Gould seats himself down in near-religious preparation, only to be interrupted by two loud coughs. He shoots the culpable party.The film is full of gloriously unpredictable moments like this, helping it transcend the immediate object of satire, which has dated, now that Hollywood has given up as unprofitable the attempt to educate audiences in high culture. So Bugs interrupts his playing to chomp on a carrot, or play with his feet. One lovely sequence has him gathering all the keys and throwing them back in perfect rhythm. Like Fischinger's 'Allegretto', 'Rhapsody' is animated music, full of a strange, mercurial, yet elegant fluidity.The centrepiece is a Tom-and-Jerry-like battle between Bugs and a small mouse who tries to undermine Bugs' pretensions, changing the solemn rhapsody for swing at one point. Despite the violence and disruption, conflict, as so often in music, leads not to chaos, but harmonic rapture. Freleng is no Tex Avery - his use of colour and camerawork is restrained - but the relative plausibility of his composition have a pleasure all of their own.