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 almost too-perfect additional real-world resonance, given that Warner Bros. attempted to squash the movie itself. It also doesn’t feel particularly true to the comic style of Looney Tunes; it’s much more in the vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s no shame in looking to that masterwork of ‘toon pastiche for inspiration, but there’s a fine line between inventively remixing old favorites, as that film did, and collecting a bunch of fan-pleasing references without adding anything new, like Space Jam: A New Legacy. Both of those movies attempt something far more complicated than their short-form ancestors in terms of both story and corporate maneuvering. As earnest as Coyote Vs. Acme is, it still smacks of that particularly contemporary complexity, which both yearns to psychologize and flesh out some Tunes while maintaining an imitative reverence to the IP.
It’s a less instinctive, more calculated reading of the whole Looney Tunes enterprise. In interviews, the filmmakers have spoken reverently about the rules Jones set up to provide parameters for the Road Runner cartoons, outlined in Chuck Amuck: “No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products”; “The Road Runner must stay on the road”; “All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation”; and so on. The fawning over these rules conveniently overlooks how often they’re broken in those cartoons: Wile E. Coyote is hit by trucks or trains countless times. “Acme” is clearly more of a placeholder-name-turned-running-gag, and isn’t actually a fixture in the early Coyote/Road Runner films. Oh, and the Road Runner frequently leaves the road.
These rules were broken because, at the time of these cartoons’ making, they did not formally exist. Jones himself hedges a little in his description of the rules after laying them out. “The above are pertinent illustrations of the kind of thinking that went into the making of these films,” he wrote. What he’s describing is how the series’ routines, rituals, and variations were shaped over the course of many years. Attempting to codify that understanding into a set of screenwriting rules might explain why some of Coyote Vs. Acme‘s slapstick feels more obligatory than inspired, and why the filmmakers felt comfortable including clunky talkiness and moments of “heart” that are far closer to middling 2020s comedies than any 1950s WB short. Even the courtroom structure is played largely straight, rather than as fodder for parody. It’s dutiful, rather than genuinely fanatical.
Coyote Vs. Acme at least understands the chaotic, antagonistic nature of these characters, even if it doesn’t take much imagination to flatten Foghorn Leghorn’s con-artist loquaciousness into a generic Menacing Southern Businessman without much trace of his specific patter. (It’s like rewriting Coen brothers dialogue to better fit the crusty old dean from a campus comedy.) While the filmmakers have imitated free-birdseed gags to their heart’s content, some details feel slapdash, like how Wile E. Coyote’s fourth-wall-breaking use of signs to communicate (mostly, in the shorts, with the audience), have become a vehicle for fake jokes, like him whipping out a sign that says “Acme Sucks!” at a court hearing. (In the shorts, the signs are as visual as they are verbal. Here they’re just subbing for bad dialogue.) Yet, this movie still beats the hell out of watching these characters play basketball.
Coyote Vs. Acme is a major improvement over the Tunes’ cheap compilations and extended sneaker commercials. It’s also a reminder that the Looney Tunes cartoons are so inherently cinematic at seven minutes that trying to make them into more of a movie at 90 minutes may be a fool’s errand. Even the best Looney Tunes movie so far, Looney Tunes: Back In Action, feels the need to situate itself in the live-action world, presumably to hew closer to the never-replicated magic of Roger Rabbit—the biggest hit featuring the stars of old-time cartoon shorts. It’s the same playing field Coyote Vs. Acme has chosen, and it’s not a bad Roger Rabbit descendant. But it’s not great Looney Tunes. Turning those shorts into features might be destined to replicate the efforts of Wile E. Coyote: Constant, irresistible, and unable to ever fully succeed.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.