Warner Bros. devours its own legacy, again.
How much do the makers of Coyote vs. Acme love the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons? Not much, since they neglect Bugs Bunny’s classic provocation “Of course you know, THIS MEANS WAR!” Instead, director Dave Green, writer Samy Burch, and producer James Gunn rewire the series of cartoons in which that indefatigable desert creature Wile E. Coyote persistently tries to capture the speedy animal Road Runner.
The plumed bird (Geococcyx californianus, here called Fastus hellus) is a Hollywood concoction whose invincibility, set against the methodical efforts of the coyote (Canis latrans, here called Hungrus carnivorus), was introduced in the 1949 short Fast and Furry-ous — devised by the masterly animators Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. In that wordless competition, derived from the pantomime genius of silent-movie comedy, Wile E. Coyote represented the relentless stalking of patent wolves preying upon fast-moving Hollywood pioneers who escaped East Coast legal eagles by fleeing to the right-to-work freedom of the West Coast.
In Coyote vs. Acme, Coyote enlists the aid of a human ambulance-chaser, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), to sue the Acme company because their products fail to capture the elusive Road Runner. Based on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker magazine satire of legal shenanigans, the movie chooses high-concept inanity. It follows the grim mix of photorealism and animation we saw in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). This conceit betrays Warner’s cartoon’s essence: The bug-eyed wolf was always outwitted by that plumed, long-legged cuckoo (the lesser roadrunner, Geococcyx velox) native to the southwestern United States. Now the opening scene of the manic Daffy Duck on television changes the Looney Tunes origin into an anti-cinematic dud rather than one of the wonders of 20th-century imagination.
Although Avery is named in homage to legendary animator Tex Avery (part of the law firm Avery, Jones & Maltese), the pettifogger gag merely evokes the lame humor of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie that coarsened playtime for Gen Z consumption. Thus, fleeting appearances by Looney Tunes figures Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Tasmanian Devil, Pepé Le Pew, a poorly drawn Gossamer, Porky Pig, and a desultory Bugs Bunny and Sylvester don’t excite nostalgia but seem random. Those mythic figures are all demeaned.
The plot that pits Avery’s diversity-quota law practice against the Acme-company attorney Buddy Crane (not-choosy John Cena) features a backstory in which a preposterous Peter Lorre figure evokes both horror-film mystery and cartoon silliness. It’s fake surrealism, crudely iconoclastic just like Roger Rabbit. None of the humans display cartoon-worthy talents or humor. The quasi-political satire of Coyote hoping to corner Road Runner during a Senate congressional hearing proves that these filmmakers have no idea of what’s timely, trenchant, or funny. (It’s impossible to laugh at Cena’s lawfare boast — “The law’s completely on our side here, cuz we wrote the law” — since it sounds so close to California’s ballot-harvest bill.)
Gunn, Green, and Burch, pandering to Millennials who feel no connection to Looney Tunes, deviate from Boomer nostalgia. Coyote vs. Acme’s misconceived style lacks visual and thematic abstraction. That’s what made those interstitial animated shorts an aesthetic high point of American popular culture — bright, simple, gorgeous, and ideational, with Mel Blanc’s flavorful voice characterizations and Carl Stalling’s stunning musical accents — unmatched by any other national cinema.
During the high point of postwar American capitalism, the era when cartoonist Al Capp mocked General Motors, Warners used products from the Acme corporation to teach a generation how to scrutinize and appreciate American ingenuity. It is typical of Gunn’s cynicism that he heroizes Coyote as a Sisyphus figure of dogged resilience, overlooking his foolish, unremitting distress. We didn’t identify with it; we laughed at it. This Millennial anxiety is not as clever or achievement-oriented as 1996’s Space Jam, which borrowed the Warners canon to enshrine Michael Jordan’s moment in the evolution of pop culture (whereas nobody wanted to see its LeBron James reboot in 2021). Like Barbie, Coyote vs. Acme is a cynical attack on American exceptionalism that reduces a legacy of cinematic genius to desperation. It resembles a DSA plot to destroy a once great idea. Bugs Bunny would know: This means culture war.
