Did you know there’s a new Looney Tunes movie out right now? Because there is, and it’s funny, weird, and zany in modern and old-school ways. It’s also a return to hand-drawn animation that mixes up the styles, giving the film a visual kick lacking in many mainstream animation films.
Granted, the title seems almost embarrassed it’s a Looney Tunes movie: The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Yet, it’s not the fault of Peter Browngardt, whose animation bona fides include Nickelodeon cartoons, the Cartoon Network, and Futurama. He and his ballclub of writers infuse the Looney Tunes world with a modern sensibility while paying homage to Cold War-era sci-fi drive-in features.
But most importantly, Browngardt and his writers understand two things:
- The Looney Tunes characters are not made for long-form narratives. They are too abrasive, anarchical, and absurd to fit in a story with traditional emotional and action beats.
- A movie with every Looney Tunes character isn’t a movie; it’s a cash grab.
With this in mind, Browngardt and his writers instead focus on Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, both voiced by Eric Bauza. The Day the Earth Blew Up is a series of sketches sewn together with a common thread of Porky’s burgeoning love for Petunia, voiced by Candi Milo, along with Daffy and Porky’s attempt to hold down a job so they don’t lose their home. Oh, and space aliens using gum to turn humans into mind-controlled zombies. It’s all so perfectly and wonderfully convoluted.
Porky and Daffy are an odd pairing that Browngardt and his writers have fun with. Some viewers may not be aware, but there are two versions of Daffy Duck. Most are familiar with the egocentric, short-tempered diva with a speech impediment. But initially, Daffy was much more an agent of chaos. Daffy was daffy, in other words. In The Day the Earth Blew Up, the filmmakers return to that version, and it’s a decision that pays off throughout.
Porky is the responsible square. They are an odd couple, and Bronhardt and the writers have a blast playing with the mismatched dynamic. The humor comes from how the loud, goofy, loony Daffy drags poor, introverted, shy, stuttering Porky out of his shell while also showing poor Porky trying to reign in the walking dumpster fire that is Daffy.
However, I fear a generation of plotcels will be left cold by The Day the Earth Blew Up. But for the rest of us who understand that Looney Tunes is about the laugh, not the sentiment, it’s better than both Space Jam movies. Still, what little plot there is, Brownhardt and his colleagues sometimes pay a little too much attention to it. Funny and zany, the film still drags in the middle, partly because Brownhardt and his writers busy themselves with structure and exposition in an attempt to appease them. The result is a slight tedium while we patiently wait for the narrative to get back to being a Looney Tunes movie.
Still, the comedy of The Day the Earth Blew Up is like firing a buckshot, a bunch of gas flung at the audience, and seeing which one even hit the target. This ensures that while you may not laugh at all of them, you are bound by the law of averages to laugh at some of them.
The gags and jokes fly fast and furious, with some verging on surrealism and others poking fun at everyday life. The filmmakers find ways to blend observational humor with dark humor. One joke about how Porky got his stutter had me convulsing in the theater and again later in the car. (And a third time writing about it.)
Above all, The Day the Earth Blew Up is fun. More importantly, the filmmakers and animators imbue a sense of playfulness in the form and the art style. At one point, a character makes a decision, and we see a shadow figure meant to be a member of the audience cry foul and storm out. Meta and nutty, the film races through its narrative with a breakneck pace while reminding us of a time when animation was risky, dangerous, and unpredictable.
The character designs are eye-catching in that they don’t follow a pattern. The characters in The Day the Earth Blew Up are not all one shape or the other. Instead, they are a panoply of sizes and shapes, such as Mrs. Grecht (Larraine Newman), like Jessica Rabbit, is proportioned in a way that would be impossible in any other medium. But that’s the gag; it’s looney.
Brownhardt has terrific patience in his comedic timing. Some jokes come off like firecrackers, one after the other. But the genius is how you don’t realize a joke has been a set-up for another joke until the pay-off begins to unwind. The Day the Earth Blew Up is a film made with love and effort that seems lacking from the studio that released it.
Warner Bros. owns the rights to Looney Tunes but has schlepped the distribution and marketing to a private distribution company, Ketchup Entertainment. Ketchup Entertainment, which has distributed Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Robert Rodriguez’s movie Hypnotic, is an odd choice to distribute one of Warner Brothers flagship IPs. The Looney Tunes characters are a Warner Bros. commodity that adorns everything from clothing to lunch boxes, and Zaslav and his toadies gave it to Ketchup Entertainment, who, either through strategy or frugal financials, have adopted a hope of word of mouth strategy. For crying out loud, they couldn’t even be bothered to do a boilerplate, “The Day the Earth Blew Up isn’t getting released-it’s escaping!”
Studios used to cajole, trick, and challenge us to see a movie. What’s the point of even having a marketing department? I sometimes wonder if this new breed of studio executive even likes movies. So allow me to do Warner Brothers and Ketchup Entertainment’s job for them: Go see The Day the Earth Blew Up… if you can find a theater playing it. It will give you a few much-needed laughs to distract you from all the other soul-crushing ennui. That alone is worth a ticket price.
Images courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment
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