For those of us who grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons, the exploits of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and so many other animated characters seemed as real to us as the actual human beings we regularly saw both on television and in the movies.
And though we’re talking about cartoons, the best ones introduced us to the more refined arts. Some of us heard opera music for the first time in the 1957 “Merry Melodies” cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc?” I, for one, can still remember my brother running around the house imitating hunter Elmer Fudd, on the trail of his quarry Bugs Bunny, singing, “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit” to the tune of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
We can thank Chuck Jones for that. Jones was the guy who for decades led the Warner’s team behind both the Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes series of cartoons, all of which featured quick pacing and irreverent humor delivered by the studio’s trademark cast of characters (most voiced by Mel Blanc).
Beginning in 1949, two of those characters were a road runner and the coyote who, by 2014, had over the course of 49 separate cartoons failed to catch his speedy prey. That, then, was the conceit: How many ways could the coyote – cleverly known as Wile. E. Coyote – flounder in his many attempts to grasp more than a single feather of what he saw as merely a meal on two legs.
That sense of futility, too, is the main theme of the movie Coyote vs. Acme, a mix of live action and animation directed by Dave Green and starring former “SNL” cast member Will Forte as the sad-sack attorney Kevin Avery.
Green’s film operates in a world of imagination that has cartoon characters living alongside actual humans. And it features a simple David vs. Goliath plotline, one in which cartoon Coyote consults with human Kevin and sets them both on a collision course with the mighty Acme corporation.
From the outset, it’s not a fair fight. Kevin is the kind of guy who, having given up battling the legal world’s big shots, specializes in cases involving violence to cartoon characters. His main ploy? Settling the cases he takes for mere hundreds of dollars at a time.
Yet Coyote’s lust to roast Road Runner over a spit is so strong that he convinces Kevin to sue Acme, charging that the devices that he has used over the years – all Acme products – were made intentionally defective. To win, though, Kevin must go up against the flashy attorney Buddy Crane (played by John Cena) and Acme’s chief executive, the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn (voiced, as with most of the other cartoon characters, by Eric Bauza, taking over for the late, great Blanc).
Kevin is reluctant to continue, even when encouraged both by Coyote – who has his own ulterior motives – and by his niece, the legal intern Paige (played by Lana Condor). But when a whistleblower shows up in the form of Bugs Bunny, revealing a sinister Acme plot involving something called Project Sisyphus – things start to break Kevin’s way.
So much of Coyote vs. Acme follows in the Chuck Jones format, with the jokes coming fast and the happy outcome never in doubt – even for Coyote who, though never achieving his dream meal, does come to a reckoning that – to paraphrase a line from “Jerry Maguire” – the Road Runner completes him.
What’s more interesting than the film itself is how it almost never got released. Warner Bros. Discovery decided in 2023 that it made more financial sense to shelve the film and seek a tax write-off rather than hope that, once released, it would make a profit. But the independent film production company Ketchup Entertainment bought the rights, took a chance and gave Coyote vs. Acme a second life.
Since the film made just a little more than $15 million its first week of release, Warner’s initial decision might have been the right one, at least financially. Yet sentimentally, the film’s revival gives some of us a chance relive our childhoods – or at least the more pleasant memories of it.
In any event, as Porky Pig would say, “That’s all folks.”