Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, with cameo appearances by Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The cartoon was part of the television special Bugs Bunny's Bustin' Out All Over, which aired May 21, 1980.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny is one of four Bugs Bunny cartoons produced during 1979-1980, the first new shorts since 1964's False Hare.

Plot

On the last day of school, children emerge from a one-room schoolhouse, gushing with joy about summer vacation. Bugs Bunny separately shares this enthusiasm but then quickly realizes how silly this is. While wondering how absurd all this is aloud, he crashes into a tree and falls unconscious.

In a dream sequence, a young Bugs (styled and sharing the same mannerisms as Bugs' nephew Clyde) is excited about a school-free summer when he runs into a young Elmer Fudd. The youthful Bugs and Elmer reprise many of the classic Bugs-Elmer cartoon scenes, including the "death scene" and Bugs threatening to report juvenile Elmer to the authorities. At one point, Elmer is about to fall from a cliff, but doesn't fall because they "haven't studied gravity yet." Later, Bugs leaves a book about gravity and Elmer finds and reads it so the next time he's about to fall from a cliff, he did fall since now he had already studied gravity, prompting him to adopt ignorance as his motto. During the fall, Wile E. Coyote appears and asks him to move over and leave falling to people who know how to do it.

In the end, Elmer obtains a machine gun (which actually fires corkscrews) and shoots Bugs repeatedly after he crashes into a tree. The dream ends, and the adult Bugs - conscious and apparently never having felt the effects of his own injury - remarks about how he and Elmer probably were "the youngest people to ever start chasing each other." Of course, Bugs could be wrong - a young Wile E. Coyote runs by, chasing an unhatched Road Runner.

Sources

• Beck, Jerry and Will Friedwald, "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons," Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1989. (ISBN 0-8050-0894-2).

External links

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny at the Internet Movie Database