Wonderful character development!

Really Surprised!

Let's be realistic.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Funny Bugs Bunny short directed by Robert McKimson. This time Bugs shows up at a greyhound racetrack, where he mistakenly thinks a fake rabbit used as a lure for the dogs to chase is real. So Bugs tries to rescue the rabbit and winds up fighting with the dogs. A simple but fun cartoon with some good gags and lines. The animation is beautiful, with well-drawn characters and backgrounds. Love the colors. Carl Stalling's music is quite nice and the voice work from Mel Blanc is, as usual, excellent. This isn't one of my favorite Bugs cartoons but it is a good one that movies along quickly. The stuff with the racetrack announcer is probably my favorite part of the short.

. . . but Bugs Bunny's idea of recreation during the 1940s Warner Bros. Looney Tune THE GREY HOUNDED HARE seems to be Sex on a Stick. Bugs apparently doesn't get out much, because the mechanical rabbit at a dog track strikes him as the epitome of "female pulchritude." If it were up solely to Bugs, the phrase "breeding like rabbits" would be synonymous with "multiplying like unicorns." Of course, Bugs' dream boat cruises around the canine raceway like a slot car. Bugs mounts her split inner rail several times, seemingly willing to do the deed in full view of the grandstand crowd. However, since the NC-17 movie rating wasn't around in the 1940s, Bugs is necessarily thwarted at every turn. (As the animation department at Warner delighted in clever wordplay referencing previous, usually outside, works, they surely would come up with a snappier title for this entry were it released today: LARS AND THE REAL BUNNY or BROWN BUNNY DOWN are a couple that come readily to mind.)

Robert McKimson's 'The Grey Hounded Hare' is a really lovely cartoon. Bright and colourful, it pits Bugs Bunny against a whole racetrack full of greyhounds as he attempts to save the female mechanical rabbit they are all chasing. Warren Foster's script is great, filled with knowingly dreadful puns involving the greyhounds' unusual names and a great running commentary during the race section. Bugs rids himself of the majority of the dogs at the halfway mark but is left with the tough No. 7 who keeps fighting to the last. McKimson directs the whole thing with aplomb, making Bugs an aggressive and determined character who, in the end, is as gullible as those he dupes, falling in love with a mechanical rabbit who administers violent electric shocks to anyone who gets fresh! I've loved 'The Grey Hounded Hare' since I was a kid but one thing trouble me even back then. At the cartoon's climax, it genuinely appears to me that Bugs is kissing the mechanical rabbit's bottom!

All too often, Bugs Bunny resembles the stereotypical American tourist, bigoted, unable to understand why he's not welcome, incapable of realising that he got things wrong the first time round. (That's the stereotype, anyway. I've yet to encounter it in real life.) He is BEYOND brash, his rhinoceros-thick hide so impenetrable that the creature inside must be regarded as merely stupid. We long for his comeuppance, are galled to discover it will never come, and insulted by the request that we be GLAD that it will never come.At least, that's what happens here. Bugs falls in love with a mechanical racetrack hare, and rushes off to save it from the slavering greyhounds chasing it - and he never learns his error, as I kept hoping he would, so that he'd go away and leave the rest of the world alone. It's not always like this with Bugs. He's impossible to dislike in a wonderful work like "Rabbit of Seville", for example, because Chuck Jones is a master director who knows how to make the character work for rather than against the cartoon. But it's important to realise that Robert McKimson's sin here is purely negative. He doesn't MAKE Bugs irritating; the character is irritating already. Rather, McKimson's stale and unimaginative direction does nothing whatever to alter or subvert or compensate for the character, leaving us with a tiresome, earthbound cartoon about an odious loudmouth.