Coyote vs. Acme

Exhausted after decades of running afoul of malfunctioning gimcrack, Wile E. Coyote decides to, at long last, sue the Acme corporation. It's a concept so purely wonderful and imaginative that, obviously, the soulless, dead-eyed hatchet men who recently ran Warner Bros into the hands of a monopoly merger were determined to burn the negative in return for a modest tax rebate. Rescued from oblivion by Ketchup Entertainment, who also distributed The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie in the United States, director Dave Green and screenwriter Samy Burch's Coyote vs. Acme (based on a beautifully written The New Yorker article by Ian Frazier) doesn't even have to be especially good to feel like a tiny victory against the rampant corporatism that has consumed a once hallowed film studio. Thankfully then, the film is not only great but actively engaged with the outright corruption on display in America's corridors of power. 

The rot is so pronounced that beloved cartoon characters find themselves warped in its presence: Elmer Fudd appears as a winking, big business-friendly Senator; Tweety is recast as a bagman, forced into mercenary servitude to protect his beloved Granny. Worst of all is Foghorn Leghorn as Acme's good ol' boy CEO who, in a congressional address, speaks on behalf of his cel-animated kind, making the truly repulsive point that his people are a malleable, physically invincible underclass who deserve nothing more than to be experimented upon. The speech is so close to the knuckle that it seems reasonable to presume that David Zaslav and his cabal of wax-faced media executives felt that issues of medical apartheid were a little too strong for their Merrie Melodies movie and that this was a deciding factor in the film's engineered non-existence. If Coyote vs. Acme has a flaw it's that (nearly) every animated character is rendered and moves with a jittery, computer-generated outline that prevents them from registering as purely beautiful. The exception to this minor disappointment is Bugs Bunny - presumably a late addition to the piece - who, in a move befitting his inexhaustible super stardom, is illustrated with a character and fluency that is outrageously in advance of his peers.