REEL | 'Looney Tunes' Sues the Pants Off 'Coyote vs. Acme'

"These companies think they can do whatever they want!"

Ketchup Entertainment / VVS Films

Coyote vs. Acme, director Dave Green's nearly shelved Warner Bros. Animation hybrid live-action comedy produced by James Gunn, is finally here, and it's pretty good. Its simple but somewhat ingenious premise of famed loser Looney Tunes cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, suing the Acme Corporation for its faulty products causing him injury, distress, and failure is a brilliant stand-in for some real-life (coincidental) business shenanigans by a certain media conglomerate and its parent companies.

Starring actual human actors, Will Forte, Lana Condor, and John Cena, as the legal representatives of the various cartoon characters and their corporate entities, Green's fluid direction captures the big, silly performances that are integrated with the two-dimensional animation fluidly. Forte is particularly well-suited for the sort of silly Better Call Saul lawyer-type representation of Coyote against the mega-corporation of Acme.

Scripted by screenwriter Samy Burch and based on the 1990 satirical New Yorker legal article written by American humourist Ian Frazier, Coyote vs. Acme takes the Who Framed Roger Rabbit conceit of a human world populated by cartoon characters and wraps a goofy legal drama around it. Everything is particularly enjoyable for long-time fans of the old-school animated Looney Tunes shorts and characters.

In a curious bit of an underdog meta-narrative of life imitating art, it's not lost on anyone how Warner Bros. tried hard to bury their very own movie about corporate irresponsibility while themselves in the process of some highly questionable decisions on the way to being sold for parts for the third time in just a few short years. The fictional Acme could hardly live up to such fictional nonsense that went on before the release of Coyote vs. Acme by an entirely different distributor, despite the scrappy film starring many of the original studio's most famous, trademark IP-owned characters.


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