The Case of the Missing Hare takes place mainly in a theater, where Bugs confronts an arrogant magician named Ala Bahma, and contrived-looking backgrounds could thus be rationalized as representing stage flats. A few months later, though, in The Aristo-Cat and The Unbearable Bear (both 1943), the backgrounds were much flatter, even starker, than those of earlier cartoons, with few reminders of the ripe color, plentiful detail, and, especially, illusion of depth that had once been standard in all the cartoons. At the same time, Jones's editing and his simulated camera angles had changed, in ways that reflected the thinking of McGrew and Fleury. In Jones's earliest cartoons, he was, in keeping with his Disney bent, a mise-en-scène director, whose camera was more often a casual observer than intensely interested and highly selective; the camera often panned languidly until it noticed something worth paying attention to. By the time of The Aristo-Cat and The Unbearable Bear, though, Jones was cutting much more rapidly and expressively, and often presenting the action from unexpected points of view.
Michael Barrier on both John McGew and Gene Fleury stylized backgrounds in Chuck Jones early 40s cartoons
