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.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

One of the few projects spry, or low profile, enough to escape a recent trend at Warner Bros in which the sickly studio permanently shelved completed (but potentially unprofitable) films for a tax write-off, director Pete Browngardt's wonderfully energetic The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie finally makes it to these shores, courtesy of Vertigo Releasing. In fairness then to the shark-eyed and dead inside executives determined to transform all media into an easily digestible grey mulch, The Day the Earth Blew Up is, absolutely, an anachronistic offering. Neither Daffy Duck nor Porky Pig are voiced by bored, slumming celebrities and the overall shape of the comedy on offer is far more indebted to the Golden Age animation of Bob Clampett, and gazing askance at Red Scare science fiction films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, than the instantly dated attempts at tapping into the zeitgeist seen in far more shameless, texture-mapped features. Even the specific characterisations of the Lonney Tunes cast on offer here are frozen in a fixed moment. Daffy, in particular, is locked into the elasticated screwball persona, seen in his early shorts, that allows for the kind of innate sabotage required to keep a ninety minute story about living chewing gum chugging along. The Day the Earth Blew Up is, strangely enough then, emblematic of the sort of niche and inexpensive artistic expression that streaming seemed to be promising, when the giants were setting out their stalls, before everybody realised that their business models were actually based around an ability to assemble agreeable background noise for people paying more attention to their phones.