I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.

Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).

While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind once the inevitable reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.

As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany, with even Wile E. Coyote’s classic comedy-duo partnership with the Road Runner transitioning from violent to cute. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.

-Brandon Ledet