Despite the best efforts of Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav to erase the legacy of the Looney Tunes entirely, there is a fully animated Looney Tunes movie in theaters, and it's fantastic. Chris Person and Gita Jackson sat down to talk about all the reasons you need to see this movie right now.
Chris: Last week I saw The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie with my good friend and laughed harder than I have at any movie in recent memory. It is, shockingly, the first fully animated, theatrically released original movie in the Loony Tunes franchise. Though Loony Tunes has been good recently, I was simply not prepared for how good this movie is. Gita, you also saw it, what's up doc?
Gita: My good friend Chris—what a movie. I saw it with my perfect husband David and I was absolutely overjoyed. There were a lot of kids in the theater with us, which made me so happy. Given the controversy surrounding the way that Warner Bros. has maintained this brand (read: they are trying to destroy it), I wasn’t sure if kids cared about the Looney Tunes at all. But on my way out, I heard a kid tell his dad that this was the most amazing movie he’s ever seen.
Chris: Honestly they were not wrong.
This movie was originally meant to be dumped on streaming and I'm glad it wasn't, because seeing it with an audience was a borderline religious experience. The movie shockingly threads that needle between being just edgy and a little abrasive without ever crossing the line to inappropriate. This is the soul of Looney Tunes, but also it reminded me a lot of what was good about 90s-2000s American cartoons, when we just let freaks put whatever out there.
Gita: All of the kids were laughing so hard during my screening—I was too. What I really appreciated was at that no point was the movie trying to teach a lesson. This was not a didactic movie about the nature of generational trauma. Its sole goal was to make the audience laugh, and it had a Simpsons-esque desire to cram as many jokes into each scene as humanly possible.
A lot of children’s entertainment is actually for adults nowadays. This was a very funny movie definitely for kids.
Chris: Right, it's not didactic or moral art. It's a cartoon duck with a mallet and a pig with a speech impediment. It is focused on "the bits" which and there's one that made me ugly laugh out loud way too much once every minute or too. I do not need to go to Loony Tunes for a moral, I go to watch a joke so silly a child can understand it, but crafted so well an adult can appreciate it.
To the extent that these things need a setup, we should talk about the premise before continuing.
Gita: Yes!!!! This is simply a movie about Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, two anthropomorphic animals that grew up with their adoptive father, Farmer Jim. After Farmer Jim…. Dies? Becomes God? They are left to take care of the house, which they do a poor job of because Daffy is well, daffy, and Porky is too shy. After a mysterious meteor hits their roof they’re left to find a job to fix it, or else they’ll be kicked out of their ancestral home. In the process they meet Petunia Pig, a flavor scientist at the gum factory, and start to get wrapped up in an alien invasion.
I gotta say—Petunia Pig, flavor scientist was a great bit. Just a huge weirdo chewing on sponges.
Chris: Porky finally has a girlfriend and she's a freak. It rocks.
That entire sequence of them being raised together rocks partially because they choose to do very limited animation for Farmer Jim, he's painted like he's the background. He basically talks like animated Clutch Cargo, just his mouth is animated but his body is painted like the scenery. At one point there's a shot of him walking that's just the character's body totally rigid moving up and down. And then they have one closeup that looks like it is animated on the 1's, just an overly fluid shot of him looking at them. It's a joke entirely about the form of animation and it is simultaneously both incredibly high effort and also very silly, and that's like the entire movie.
This movie is also very clearly modeled after Bob Clampett, and I know his daughter Ruth Clampett has a cameo as a waitress.
Gita: Oh my god I didn’t know that!
That’s so cool.
The whole movie is above letter to specifically the American traditions of animation. They change styles several times within the movie, and make a lot of homages to classic Looney Tunes style bits. The montage of them getting jobs and then getting fired from them is framed as a show within a show Looney Tunes episode.
Chris: The beginning has a Fleischer Superman quality to it that's very clearly intentional.
Gita: Yes!
Chris: A big portion of the plot is about how Daffy and Porky are kinda fuckups, like their weird relationship as brothers. Porky is the relatively sensible one and Daffy is constantly fucking things up or sabotaging things because he's a cartoon.
Including Porky's new relationship with his girlfriend. They get a new job but then the middle act of the plot is an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers/The Faculty bit where the aliens are taking over the minds of everyone with gum. They even do the Donald Sutherland pointing shot.
Gita: This is what I mean about it being Simpsons-esque. There's this one scene that my husband loves to use to demonstrate just how packed full of jokes each scene in the Simpsons is:
Literally every four seconds in this movie, they are trying to keep the energy up in the same way. Each frame has a joke that will land for somebody, hopefully everyone.
Chris: This movie has 11 writers and honestly it works, you need that many for this kind of joke density. I didn't realize Johnny Ryan worked on this!
Gita: What! Oh my god.
Just an embarrassment of riches on this movie.
Seeing this movie gave me a level of hope for the future of animation that is matched in intensity by the despair I feel looking at stupid AI art that people keep making.
Chris: Yeah I was not expecting to leave the theater feeling a sense of optimism, particularly given the state of animation generally and the abuse this franchise has suffered by David Zaslav specifically, but there is so much love in every single frame and it was just so affirming to see something that willful on the big screen.
Gita: Did you have any favorite jokes? For me, the ten second bit where Daffy attempts to become an influencer and gets canceled had me howling.
Chris: There's a series of gags back to back that involve everyone reacting to Daffy being the deciding factor. Second place is this montage of Porky falling for Petunia after she comes in from the rain and it cuts back and forth between what he thinks she looks like and what she actually looks like and it's edited and animated perfectly.
Some of the best jokes are just line reads and tiny details in the background. It's just a constant barrage I can't keep them straight. Man, I should see this movie again.
Gita: I want to see it a million times. I was so happy that I was in the theater for the gag of someone leaving the theater--I have never actually seen a joke of that type in an actual movie theater and it was just perfect.
You know what I mean—a silhouette of a man stood up on the screen and muttered "Who greenlit this?"
Chris: Oh yeah that's the bit I was talking about.
Gita: If this movie is screening near you, RUN do not walk to theaters. This is a kind of animated movie we really do not see a lot of anymore, and it's a gem, a special production, and apparently word of mouth is the only thing keeping it in theaters.
Chris: I agree: Do not wait. If you haven't seen it already, go out to a theater to see it if you have the means and are able to. Don't wait for it on streaming unless you have to, see it with a group of people from all ages. Laugh your ass off with Daffy and Porky.
Show them that cartoons like this are not only viable, they're vital.
