Since the nineteen sixties Warner Bros has had what must be a uniquely frustrating problem:

They own some of the most beloved and iconic cartoon characters in history but have no viable format with which to use them. The Looney Tunes were the absolute masters of the theatrical animated short, which these days is like being the world’s best court jester. Impressive, but how exactly does one make money from that?

Each one of these characters was honed by a process of rigorous cinematic evolution for one purpose; deliver as many fantastic gags as possible within a seven minute span. And, like any creature that evolved for a super-specific niche, they don’t handle changes to their environment well.

Part of the problem is that their style of comedy is primarily visual. Oh sure, there’s plenty of great verbal comedy but the bulk of the laughs come from Mel Blanc’s delivery and some of the most sublime animation ever put to film. And you’re just not going to get that on a TV animation budget. Especially not Mel Blanc.

As for movies, Warner Bros have tried to make the Tunes work in feature animation for decades. These were usually anthology films, taking several classic shorts united by a common theme (horror, sci-fi, show-biz) and weaving them into a loose narrative. At their best, these films are fine. But they are very obviously classic cartoons interspersed with visibly weaker animation and an audibly older and tireder Mel Blanc. They don’t really work as movies and that comes down, fundamentally, to just the different nature of how Warner Bros crfated these characters compared to, say, Disney.

Here’s the difference. Donald Duck will never be as funny as Daffy Duck.

But I can tell you more about Donald. He has a girlfriend, nephews, a super-rich uncle and a personality that holds true across decades of adaptations. Whereas the only thing that really remains consistent across Daffy’s cartoons is Daffy himself. This is pretty much the point of Duck Amuck. You can change everything about the cartoon, but Daffy’s still Daffy. But that means that there’s not as much there there. A Donald Duck movie doesn’t seem as inherently flawed an idea to me as a Daffy Duck movie. And this kinda holds true for all the Tunes to a greater or lesser extent. They’re wonderful but they’re not particularly deep. They can’t go on the kind of journey that audiences expect from a movie because these characters don’t change. They’re eternal archetypes. That’s why they work.

In the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit a new possible solution to this conundrum was tried: centre the movie on a human protagonist and have the Tunes as supporting comedy relief. Not a bad idea in theory.

Space Jam was FUCKING TERRIBLE (cast the nostalgia goggles away, my child, cast them far), Back in Action was a noble effort that tanked at the box office and Space Jam 2 came out in the weird year of 2021 where it seemed every movie hated itself and you for watching it.

It was at this point that Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav decided that sure, the Looney Tunes were an iconic part of American culture, but that doesn’t return value for the shareholders and proceeded to bury everything in production connected with them including not one, but TWO actually fully completed films; The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote Versus ACME. He buried the hard work of countless talented artists with the intention that these movies would never see the light of day. For a tax write-off.

Thank God, Ketchup Entertainment, a small independent studio fighting for the rights of the poor and oppressed everywhere, swung into Zaslav’s office, made off with both films and released them to the public.

I saw both films in theatres (as did you, of course, because you are a GOOD person who wants to support animation as an artform) and I want to talk about them both because they’re fascinating case studies showing just why it’s so hard to adapt these characters to feature length. And we’ll discuss whether either or both of them actually succeeded.

The Day the Earth Blew Up casts Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as siblings who were raised by a kindly farmer and were left his house when he died. After letting their home collapse into total squalor they have to get jobs to repair it. By chance they meet Petunia Pig, a scientist working at the local chewing gum factory and ultimately get embroiled in a plot by aliens to control the Earth through chewing gum. The plot is simultaneously entirely superfluous and distractingly overstuffed.

So, first things first. If you are in any way a fan of animation as an artform you owe it to yourself to see this film. The movie basically answers the question “what if you went back in time and gave Bob Clampett modern animation technology and a huge budget and told him to go nuts?”*

On a purely animation level this movie is an absolute treat and, on a scene by scene basis it brilliantly recaptures the energy of a certain era of Looney Tunes.

That said, while it definitely is worth the price of admittance on the animation alone, I’m not sure that it successfully makes the case for the Looney Tunes at feature length, despite being easily the best example of that at the time of its release.

This is partially my own biases speaking. I said that it perfectly evokes a certain era of Looney Tunes, but that’s not an era I particularly love. I prefer Greedy Bastard Daffy Duck over Unhinged Mental Patient Daffy Duck and I prefer the more restrained comedic style of Chuck Jones’ late-forties and early fifties shorts to Clampett’s bug-eyed hooting and tom-foolery.

Ultimately though…it’s good but it’s not quite great. Some of the jokes land, some don’t. And it does ultimately have a bit of that anthology film feeling, that this is more a series of shorts sewn together than a single cohesive narrative. Individual scenes are great and it DEFINITELY deserved a better fate than Warner Bros intended for it, but I also can’t say it completely escapes the same problems that have bedevilled all previous attempts at feature length Looney Tunes.

Which brings us to Coyote versus ACME, a movie that not only was intended to never be released but was actually believed to be destroyed for a long time.

Now, I’ll be honest, when I first heard about this movie I thought it couldn’t work. Take everything I said at the start about why translating Looney Tunes to feature length is tricky: it all goes triple for Coyote and Road Runner.

The Road Runner shorts are the Looney Tunes formula pared down to its purest form. No dialogue. No plot. Just pure uncut slapstick perfection. How do you make a movie about a character who says nothing, never changes and only wants one thing? So, even though I wished the film well and certainly never wanted to see it buried, I also suspected that when we finally saw it we’d all be like “oh, THAT’S why they didn’t want anyone to see this.”

I did not expect it to be good. And I certainly did not expect it to be one of the best film’s I’ve seen all year. I did not expect the creators to take the simplest and most one-note characters in the Looney Tunes pantheon and use him to spin a hilarious and often deeply moving parable about corporate greed, the exploitation of vulnerable minorities and the death of the American Dream.

I did NOT, gentle reader, expect to be crying over Wile E. Fucking Coyote.

In a world where cartoons and humans co-exist Roger Rabbit-style we open with your typical Road Runner/Coyote shenanigans with the Coyote trying and failing to catch the bird with some Acme Rocket boots. When it inevitably goes tits up he hauls his mangled broken body back to his cave to try again. On the TV he sees an ad from a personal injury lawyer named Kevin Avery who makes his living suing Acme for token amounts for their faulty products. The Coyote tricks Avery into filing a suit not just for the rocket books but for literally every gadget, gizmo and whatcahmacallit that ever blew up in his face which triggers a massive class action lawsuit that ends up exposing a secret conspiracy at the heart of the Acme corporation.

Let me get my one criticism out of the way: I don’t love the animation. It’s done in this faux 2D CGI style that looks quite plasticky at times, particularly when it comes to the “human” cartoon characters like Granny. In fact, this movie functions as the perfect counterpoint to The Day the Earth Blew Up. Instead of “awesome animation, so-so movie” we get “so-so animation, FANTASTIC MOVIE”.

This thing juggles being a legal drama while still being a fantastic Looney Tunes movie and it works so well. There’s a mid-point reveal in a motel room that I won’t spoil but it’s hilarious and so perfectly in keeping with the Coyote’s character that I hooted like a loon.

Of course, the meta-narrative is impossible to ignore. The movie about the little guy crushed by a corporate monolith that owns literally everything was itself almost destroyed before being rescued in a final act twist.

It’s for this reason that I think I’ve detected a certain reluctance on behalf of some critics to give this movie its flowers. I get that. It’s natural to self-correct a little because everyone wants this movie to be great because the David versus Goliath story is so iresistable. The movie skewering corporate greed that was almost killed by corporate greed is now a huge hit. It’s so fun to think of David Zaslov shaking his fist in impotent fury, egg dribbling down his chin that it seems too good to be true. The story can’t really end like that, can it? We couldn’t be that lucky.

But I’m calling it. While the story around it definitely makes it even more wonderful, I believe the movie stands on its own.

Yes, it really is that good. And I think we have a future classic on our hands.

And while this was probably a once-in-a-generation fluke, if they have any sense Hollywood will be looking at the Looney Tones with one question on their lips.

NEXT UPDATE: 24 September 2026

NEXT TIME: I…CAN! But maybe I shouldn’t?

*And no, the answer is NOT “he’d claim that he invented that modern animation technology and not give you any credit” how could you even THINK of such a thing? I’m ashamed of you.