What's Cookin' Doc?

One of the most famous of all Bugs Bunnies, in which our hero believes he's a shoo-in for a Best Actor Oscar. Behind the comedy is a laceratingly cruel satire.

The film opens with a traditional Voice of God introduction to the Oscars, as our narrator shows us the Hollywood sights before showing us the hotel where the event will take place, the crowds awaiting their favourite stars. Already Hollywood, the entity, the myth is reduced to a series of recognisable signs - the Hollywood Bowl, the Troccadero, the Chinese Restaurant etc.; the stars who exist only as their popular image, cemented in a ghostly pair of feet on some footpath.

Bugs is convinced that he will win because he can do impressions of all the stars. This is a stunningly versatile monologue as Bugs mocks everyone from Jimmy Cagney to Bing Crosby, but surely it's an insolence to think that mere mimicry can be as worthy as a great performance? But Bugs' point is precisely this - the Awards pretentiously think that they are rewarding high art, when these great actors are locked in stereotype and received image. They are the sums of their persona. Bugs IS greater than them because he can do an impression of Cagney AND Crosby; they can only do impressions of themselves. A list of Oscar winners from the period proves Bugs unerringly right (MRS. MINIVER, according to Oscar, is a far greater film than CITIZEN KANE.)

As a further treat we are shown a clip from Bugs' LITTLE HAIWATHA, in which a bathing Bugs realises that he is about to become rabbit-meat for a placid Indian/Elmer Fudd. This remarkable clip, stunningly self-reflexive about Hollywood ideology and racism, reveals Bugs' true worth, but for the Academy to reward him would be to admit their own worthlessness and fraudulence. So they stone him. He is awarded, however, the first Raspberry, moulded in his own image, which comes to life and kisses him. This is Hollywood's ultimate insult, but it's eventual proof of Bugs' superiority, his versatility, his embracing of fragmentation and metamorphosis at the expense of rigid, conservative, stereotypical, wholeness.

As animation, the short isn't as fleet-footed, violent or versatile as the great Tex Avery masterpieces, but there's a belligerent gaudiness of colour that suits the subject admirably.