"High Diving Hare" is a great Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam cartoon directed by Friz Freleng. As Freleng noted, this is essentially a one-gag picture, and indeed, it is delightful and exceptionally funny to see Bugs repeatedly get the best of the obnoxious Sam by tricking him into falling off a high-diving platform into a bucket of water (or sometimes NOT into the bucket!).
One particularly memorable gag involves Sam falling off the diving board and briefly rising back in the air to tell Bugs he hates him before plunging back down into the water. And, as some folks have already pointed out, near the end of the film the camera shows a still shot of Sam climbing up the ladder, followed by a few seconds of silence, and then Sam plunging down into the water without the viewer knowing how the mishap occurred. As director Greg Ford noted in his audio commentary for another Friz Freleng cartoon, "Ain't She Tweet" (1952), great humor is not so much what you see or hear but what you DON'T see or hear, as the aforementioned scene indicates.
And finally, let us not forget the musical contributions of Carl W. Stalling (I am a professional musician, so it is usually very easy for me to pick out all the tunes and melodies that I recognize in these cartoons), as for example the descending piano glissando in the overhead shot of Sam plunging head-first into the bucket of water. The music also adds to the humor of Bugs' Indian disguise when it takes on the stereotypical characteristics of an Indian war dance.
One particularly memorable gag involves Sam falling off the diving board and briefly rising back in the air to tell Bugs he hates him before plunging back down into the water. And, as some folks have already pointed out, near the end of the film the camera shows a still shot of Sam climbing up the ladder, followed by a few seconds of silence, and then Sam plunging down into the water without the viewer knowing how the mishap occurred. As director Greg Ford noted in his audio commentary for another Friz Freleng cartoon, "Ain't She Tweet" (1952), great humor is not so much what you see or hear but what you DON'T see or hear, as the aforementioned scene indicates.
And finally, let us not forget the musical contributions of Carl W. Stalling (I am a professional musician, so it is usually very easy for me to pick out all the tunes and melodies that I recognize in these cartoons), as for example the descending piano glissando in the overhead shot of Sam plunging head-first into the bucket of water. The music also adds to the humor of Bugs' Indian disguise when it takes on the stereotypical characteristics of an Indian war dance.