We almost didn’t get to see Coyote Vs. Acme, which would have been something of a tragedy. In 2023, Warner Bros., the studio that has owned the delightfully unhinged Looney Tunes universe for almost a century, unceremoniously dropped the movie from its release calendar. An uproar ensued, online and elsewhere, and eventually Ketchup Entertainment picked it up for distribution.
Thank goodness: This is one barrel of unhinged delights.
The movie gets in a couple of digs at its former studio, which still has its name on the film. Titles at the start of the movie announce that Warner Animation Group is “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation”.
Sign up to The Nightly’s newsletters.
Get the first look at the digital newspaper, curated daily stories and breaking headlines delivered to your inbox.
By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.
Acme Corp., as you doubtless know, is the shadowy, fake but weirdly real-feeling conglomerate that produces various products in these cartoons’ universe, most notably the myriad items (roller skates with rockets, malfunctioning explosives, a jet-propelled pogo stick) that have caused extensive bodily harm to Wile E. Coyote in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Road Runner since their first joint appearance in 1949. This is not a company that makes things that work right nor one that readily admits it.
John Cena seen with Foghorn Leghorn. Credit: Keylight Pictures/Warner Bros
In fact, that’s what the movie’s about. Based on Ian Frazier’s now-classic 1990 New Yorker column, and rendered (beautifully) in a hybrid animation style, the story concerns oyote’s decision to sue Acme Corp.
He enlists a random lawyer, the kind you see in a TV commercial late at night, named Kevin Avery (the very much not animated Will Forte). He is a partner at Avery, Jones and Maltese in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (The law firm is named for Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, three of the men who created Looney Tunes.)
Avery is so down on his luck that he sees no point in taking the case, wishing instead to settle. But his plucky and overachieving intern Paige (Lana Condor), who is also his niece, talks him into taking on the fight. Their opponents: the well-funded Acme lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena), who, as it happens, was also Avery’s rival when they were at law school and who has been warned by the Acme executive Foghorn Leghorn not to reveal any company secrets at trial. That might turn out to be a challenge.
This is a terrifically daffy film full of cameos from the Looney Tunes crowd — Tweety, Bugs, Granny, Elmer Fudd and Daffy himself, among others — and it is of course very silly, but in the way all Looney Tunes are. (Most of the animated characters are voiced by Eric Bauza.)
There’s a darker paranoid current running underneath, born of its founding era and its creators’ sly jabs at the postwar American milieu. To explain too much would be to spoil your fun, but here the original cartoons’ Cold War-era suspicion of everything — corporations, the government, other people — is threaded throughout, laced with the wacky, ever-so-slightly sadistic humour that characterises the Looney Tunes universe.
Directed by Dave Green, the film boasts a screenplay with a very fun pedigree: It’s written by Samy Burch (of May December and Late Fame) from a story by Burch, Jeremy Slater and the current god of the DC universe, James Gunn.
You quickly get the sense this movie springs from the brains of Looney Tunes obsessives; any film like this risks teetering from homage into pandering, but this one never gets too indulgent, which is just right for these characters. They’ve found a new story to tell, one rife with whistleblowing and conspiracies and corporate malfeasance, that lovingly expands their lore without trying to make it too contemporary.
What they understand, in some sense, is simply what makes Looney Tunes appealing in general, and the saga of Coyote and Road Runner in particular. Those two have been at it for so long that it’s easy to ignore what makes them great: the endlessly re-inventive simplicity of the match-up. It’s basically silent comedy, save for Road Runner’s “beep beep.” Road Runner is wide-eyed, chipper and speedy; Coyote just wants to catch him and will keep trying, no matter how many times he has failed.
Tweety and many Sylvesters. Credit: Keylight Pictures/Warner Bros
The myth of Sisyphus is repeatedly invoked throughout Coyote Vs. Acme, for obvious reasons: Every Acme device that blows up is another roll of the stone. But you have to think of philosopher and novelist Albert Camus’ notion of the myth: He proposes that Sisyphus is a hero because he owns his fate and derives meaning from its meaninglessness. Coyote’s reason for being is to chase this Road Runner and get crushed or blown up. He would be nobody without that task.
Coyote Vs. Acme takes that idea and gently reapplies it, this time to the struggle of the little guy against the faceless, careless corporation (one in bed with the government, to boot). It’s clever and also accidentally resonant, not least because this movie itself feels like the underdog that somehow prevailed.
At the tail end of the credits, the filmmakers insert another message, thanking “everyone who posted, shared, held up signs, and spoke out when it counted. This film made it to the big screen because of you.”
There’s no way for Coyote Vs. Acme to intentionally be about its own release brouhaha, but that just goes to show this story repeats itself, over and over again.
Coyote Vs. Acme is in cinemas September 17
