Rabbit Rampage 1955

This short cartoon unfolds around Bugs Bunny, who discovers that the person shaping his world is not a fellow rabbit but an animator intent on directing every frame. The opening scene shows Bugs’ hole being drawn in the ground, only to be erased and redrawn in the sky. A sleepy Bugs climbs out and, in a quick turn, finds himself at the mercy of the animator who wants to choreograph his every move. Bugs makes his preference clear: he does not want to be a victim of an artist who plans to make him look bad. Yet the animator keeps testing him, erasing the ground itself and forcing Bugs to dive headfirst into a groundless trap before he can react.

Bugs is then confronted with a running joke about cowardice, as the animator paints a yellow streak on Bugs’ back. Bugs snatches the brush and breaks it, signaling his defiance. He threatens to report the animator to Warner Bros. and calls the creator “a menace to society,” a meta-commentary on the power dynamics of cartoons and studios. The animator counters with a cartoonish picket sign in Bugs’ left hand that reads, “I won’t work,” prompting Bugs to panic and discard it off-screen. The cycle continues as the animator conjures another sign, this time declaring, “I refuse to live up to my contract.” After the flurry of protest and hand-waving, Bugs reluctantly agrees to continue the project, though not before the animator adds a hat to Bugs’ head—an absurd provocation that bugs refuses by tossing it aside.

The animator counters with a bigger gag: a sequence of hats, wigs, and other head adornments stacked one atop another. Each piece is discarded in a growing cascade of ridiculous headgear until Bugs finally surrenders to the endless parade. In the next beat, the animator sketches a rotated forest and Bugs, trying to retreat to his hole, ends up chasing his tail as the scene spirals into a surreal chase. A clever bit of misdirection erases Bugs’ head, then replaces it with a pumpkin, which Bugs promptly objects to. The artist merely adds ears to the pumpkin, which inflates Bugs’ fury even further. When the pumpkin head is erased again, the head reappears in a different form, until Bugs discovers that his own head has become comically small, while his voice sounds unusually high. He demands his normal head back, and the animator complies—though not without first transplanting human ears, then long, droopy rabbit ears, only to revert them when Bugs protests the literalism.

With his ears restored, Bugs moves on, only for the tail to be erased and replaced with a horse’s tail. When Bugs notes that a horse should have a horse’s tail, the animator escalates and redraws Bugs as a horse himself. Bugs, now standing upright on hind legs and nibbling a carrot, points out that his contract specifies he is a rabbit, and the cartoon must reflect that. The animator pretends to comply by erasing the horse body and drawing a more abstract, simplified rabbit with oversized cheeks and big feet. Bugs warns that this type of manipulation could have consequences, and the animator obliges to restore him to his expected form.

A new moment of mischief arrives when the animator toys with the possibility of painting Bugs into a grasshopper, but Bugs quickly retrieves the brush. He tries to make peace, suggesting they could collaborate on something popular, but the animator retaliates by creating two clones of Bugs. Bugs shoves the clones out of the frame and declares that he will not leave the spot until the boss is brought in. The animator then places Bugs on a railroad track with a train coming from a tunnel behind him. Bugs leans on a rock to dodge the engine as it passes and asserts that he still knows a way out, pulling down a card that reads “The End.”

The camera pulls back to reveal the animator as Elmer Fudd in a cameo, who chuckles and addresses the audience with a playful line that signals the cartoonish justice of the moment. The playful sting of the meta-joke lands as Bugs’ world is once again under the animator’s control, yet the audience is reminded that this is all part of the game of cartoons and their creators.

“Well anyway, I finawwy got even with that scwewy wabbit!”