Summary
The Looney Tunes are released from tax prison to wreak their joyful havoc on the world in this hybrid animation in the style of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The saga of Coyote Vs. Acme’s release has become a tale worthy of its own movie. Largely shot back in 2022 for a planned 2023 release, like Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl it was shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery as a tax write-down. Yet director Dave Green’s animated hybrid defied expectations, garnered a campaign and eventually made it to cinemas under a distribution deal with Ketchup Entertainment. So, is it any good?
The thing is, yes: it’s a lot of fun. And at least good enough to stand up to and be embraced by even the most cynical of Looney Tunes fans. Based on the 1990 New Yorker magazine article “Coyote v. Acme”, Samy Burch’s (May December) screenplay pokes gentle fun at the Looney Tunes cartoons while being a heartfelt love letter to cartooning.
Opening with a classic scenario, in which Wile E. Coyote attempts to catch an unusually fast Road Runner, Coyote’s Acme rocket skates fail. Slinking back to his lonely cave, surrounded by broken gadgets, Coyote spots an ad from billboard attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specialises in small claims for cartoons. Coyote’s insistence on suing Acme for the entirety of his life’s failures gets the attention of Buddy Crane (John Cena), Acme’s top lawyer and Avery’s old rival.
There is, of course, more than a little bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in Coyote’s DNA. Even the filmmakers have copped to the influence, especially the casual interactions between cartoons and humans in the real world. Yet where Roger Rabbit took its inspiration from noir and pulp novels, Green’s film aims to be as looney as the cartoons that spawned it while nodding heavily to the past.
So, there’s Tweety as a company stooge. Foghorn Leghorn as a southern-fried boss. An Albuquerque Carrot Festival. (Shoulda turned left there.) Bugs Bunny as a mysterious Deep Throat-style informant and Pepe Le Pew winkingly spritzed with anti-predator spray. Every time it teeters too close to fan service, it subverts your expectations slightly – especially with a few unexpected emotional moments during the climactic courtroom scene.
The animation makes great use of cel-shaded CGI characters designed to mirror the traditional 2D hand-drawn style of the original cartoons. The effect is quite good, with the cartoons given a sense of weight and presence in the ‘real’ world. Sometimes it’s as simple as a cartoon printer interacting with paper, or Cena squeezing Tweety in one of the film’s more memorable exchanges. At other times, Coyote is a pure ‘toon, licking his eyeballs with unrestrained hunger for the Road Runner.
Purists may quibble over the depiction of some of their favourite characters here. Or that the Looney Tunes are once again forced into a live-action scenario rather than standing on their own capable paws. But I like to think of this as all the cartoons just playing their part on a bigger stage. As it turns out, the story on screen mirrors the real world’s need to keep stories alive for audiences the world over. And that’s not all, folks.
2026 | USA | DIRECTOR: Dave Green | WRITERS: Samy Burch (Based on The New Yorker article by Ian Frazier | CAST: Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P. J. Byrne, Eric Bauza, Kenneth Choi, John Cena | DISTRIBUTOR: Pinnacle Films (Australia), Ketchup Entertainment (USA) | RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 28 August 2026 (USA), 17 September 2026 (Australia)