Coyote Vs. Acme won its case, but still loses to the legacy of Looney Tunes — The A.V. Club

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

By most accounts, the saga of Coyote Vs. Acme has a happy ending. A Looney Tunes movie made with far more love and skill than the higher-profile Space Jam joints was abandoned by Warner Bros. until it became a cause célèbre. The attention over its impending tax write-off demise saved the movie, which was sold off to a smaller distributor that put it in thousands of movie theaters. Now an all-ages comedy actually uses the Looney Tunes characters directly, rather than bastardizing their manic energy without entirely understanding it.

This all means that Coyote Vs. Acme stands out from big-budget computer-animated spectaculars (in its use of the Tunes) and from previous Looney Tunes projects (in its bumpy road to the big screen, and its lack of basketball). In the longer view, however, it’s very much in line with past Tunes features, in that it confirms the difficulty of making a fully successful feature with these characters. Any Looney Tunes movie is competing less with Illumination, DreamWorks, or Disney and more with its own illustrious past as pure cinema.

This might seem counterintuitive to those who first encountered the Looney Tunes shorts compiled on television, rather than in the movie theaters where they first played from the 1930s into the 1960s. It’s not uncommon to hear Looney Tunes referred to as a TV show, and indeed that’s how many of their feature films over the years—compilations stitched together with new material; the Space Jam movies; The Day The Earth Blew Up —have played, like an expansion of a long-running series (or in Space Jam ‘s case, commercials). But the Warner Bros. shorts are a masterclass in cinematic techniques with surprising range. They don’t just exemplify classic animation elements like character design or background painting, but the rhythms of more universal components like timing, music, and visual storytelling, as well as rarer ones like witty dialogue and genre parody. The best classic shorts have both an immediacy and a stylishness that connects more strongly to golden-age cinema than televised ‘toons—unsurprising, given that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies predate TV shows.

The work of director Chuck Jones and his go-to writer Michael Maltese could encompass both dialogue-heavy screwball banter—as in the shorts where Bugs and Daffy debate whether Elmer Fudd should be observing duck or rabbit season—and largely dialogue-free characters—as in the shorts about the sheepdog clocking in to protect his flock from a wolf or, more famously, the ones about Wile E. Coyote in deathless pursuit of the cheerful Road Runner.

The vignettes of misfortune that make up these films are brilliant silent comedies. They also, in their slapstick way, bridge the gap between Buster Keaton-style comic stunts and later effects-enhanced action-movie flights of fancy. The latter can involve the bending of gravitational rules, or illustrating the precise timing that can make the difference between unlikely success and disastrous failure. That the Coyote is destined to fail is what makes the shorts into comedy, but there is an anticipatory suspense as to the details of how he will fail. It’s the comic inverse of understanding that the action hero will likely triumph, recalling frequently used ingredients (guns, chases, last-minute close calls), but not knowing the exact details of how he’ll pull it off.

Viewers of the Coyote/Road Runner shorts will quickly become accustomed to recurring images, like the tropes of a genre. Sometimes those images, like the Coyote plummeting over a cliff, viewed from an overhead shot depicting a tiny puff of desert sand as he hits the ground, serve as the predictably repeated punctuation to a scene. Other times, they are the subject of skillful variations, as with various gags that follow him on his fall, playing around with how and when he’ll hit the ground and what might subsequently fall onto him. These cartoons even provide an introduction to cinematic subtext. Individually, they are about one cartoon animal chasing another, like so much other short-form animated midcentury comedy. Collectively, they take on a more existential pattern. The tacit subject becomes Wile E. Coyote’s weirdly relatable compulsion, half dutiful and half fanatical. As Chuck Jones wrote in Chuck Amuck : “The Coyote tries by any means to capture the Road Runner, ostensibly and at first to eat him, but this motive has become beclouded, and it has become, in my mind at least, a question of loss of dignity that forces him to continue. And who is the Coyote’s enemy? Why, the Coyote.”

Coyote Vs. Acme recontextualizes that innate sympathy as part of a scrappy underdog story. In doing so, it accidentally highlights the purity of those shorts. The new film pays loving tribute to the original cartoons from a variety of angles: actual clips are shown; memorable scenes and images are recreated; and new Coyote/Road Runner gags are interspersed throughout. (In one variation, several humans use a Coyote-like scheme in an attempt to serve the Road Runner a subpoena. Piles of baited birdseed, as ever, fail to do the job.) The film also pays appropriate homage to the Coyote’s fanaticism when a particular plot twist perfectly undermines the potentially sentimental angle of bringing the Coyote’s anti-heroic struggle from subtext to text.

At the same time, Coyote Vs. Acme can’t help but feel compromised in its insistence on turning an expression of pure cinema into something filled with screenwriterly lore. The Acme Corporation is recast as a modern conglomerate with an accompanying corporate conspiracy, making them the true enemy of the picture (even while acknowledging that, like a more one-sided version of Batman and the Joker, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are destined to keep doing their little dance forever). It’s a clever idea with almo...

Coyote Vs. Acme won its case, but still loses to the legacy of Looney Tunes — The A.V. Club | AIPROPX