A still from What’s Opera, Doc? Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan:1. Maurice Noble’s design for What’s Opera, Doc? (1957).2. Animation newsbits.3.

The last word. With that, let’s go! It’s one of the really famous cartoons. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably watched it yourself.

After almost 70 years, What’s Opera, Doc? endures. Classic status wasn’t exactly the team’s goal. This was, in some ways, a workaday Bugs Bunny production. “What’s Opera, Doc? is one many Europeans adore,” Chuck Jones said in the ‘70s. “They call that my ‘masterpiece,’ which it may or may not be; I didn’t think about it at the time.”1He did know it was a bit ambitious.

At a cost of $35,510 (almost $430,000 today), it was spendier than most Warner cartoons. It took seven weeks compared to the standard five. To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards.

It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)2Some unique features of this project were its complicated score, recorded ahead of time, and its movements studied from ballet stars Tatiana Riabouchinska and David Lichine. Plus, Jones drew “almost 500” pose sketches (“as well as a further 1,500 unused roughs”) to guide his animators, whereas most films got 300.3Those things and others, including the voice performances, made the short special. But Jones liked to credit one element and one person in particular with its success.

He pointed to Maurice Noble, designer of the colors and layouts. What’s Opera, Doc? is a film of “angular settings, gargantuan shadows, rapid cuts, odd colors and dramatic camera angles,” in the words of Charles Solomon. And every shot of it required Noble’s touch. “Without Maurice Noble, who excited, moved and stimulated us all,” Jones wrote, “that film could not have been made.”4Stills from What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)A snippet of animation from the film Maurice Noble was one of the top mid-century cartoon designers.

But he wasn’t a member or a fan of UPA. “I don’t believe I was influenced by UPA at all. ... I think UPA outsmarted itself in overdesigning,” he said. The UPA designers, for their part, didn’t seem to like him, either.5Either way, Noble gave many of Jones’s films a slick, modernist look in the ‘50s.

He viewed design as a form of storytelling and adjusted his style to fit each project. “Background design is all about conveying emotion and supporting personality,” Noble once said. Like he told Animato: I am a great believer in the idea that color and visual impact have a lot to do with the response of the audience. I would play for dramatic impact in both design and color, in terms of putting over a story point.

No background is any good unless it’s appropriate to the given situation or mood of the thing that’s being portrayed. This functional aspect of Noble’s work was something Jones loved and often glowed about: He had great staging techniques, and he understood what very few background men do understand — and actually very many live-action people don’t seem to understand it in the graphics area: that the purpose of a great designer is to design an arena where the actor can perform. Or the animator can perform.

And where the action shows itself to its best advantage. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t have high design. You remember What’s Opera, Doc? — the thing would have been cluttered, except that it was so well designed.6In Jones’s Wagner send-up, the Noble method was especially key.

This time, a good deal of the story “had to be told in graphics,” as Jones put it. Noble wasn’t the first designer attached to the project. It started with Ernie Nordli, who gave What’s Opera, Doc? a stagey treatment with a proscenium arch.

When Noble took over, he scrapped that direction in favor of “super-g...