The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

Tax Write-Off: The Movie

or

"As Long As the Plot Doesn't Twist!" (Foreshadowing)

 

There's never been a Looney Tunes feature film. No, No. Not the ones, where they combined live action with animation, like Looney Tunes: Back in Action or the Space Jam's (which kind of ham-strung the characters), or the compilation-movies that were put out to make a quick buck. I mean an actual feature film that featured the characters—any of them—in a full-blown story that lasted more than an hour. No, they were usually confined to ten minute shorts that used to be shown in between newsreels and previews in theaters ('way back in the day), or were syndicated into packages for Saturday morning consumption and maybe even prime-time. They were a ready-made property of the Warner Brothers studio and enough of them garnered recognition, even Oscars, that the studio kept churning them out, even as budgets got scrunched, then the Animation Department (dubbed "Termite Terrace") was sold lock, stock, and barrel (all made by Acme™) the finished product then scattered into whatever format made the old Warner studio the most money, the characters adorning T-shirts and appropriated for other swag. The characters were put out to pasture, to be re-processed into new versions by nostalgic directors like Spielberg. At the moment, there is a division of the studio called Warner Brothers Pictures Animation, which will make things like The Lego Movie or DC League of Super-Pets. The history is complicated, the business even more so, to the point where one of the intended Warner movies, Coyote vs. Acme, was shelved by current CEO David Zaslav, supposedly as a tax write-off (although it may be picked up for distribution by Ketchup Entertainment). This is a lot of boring business talk to start a review of a cartoon.

Speaking of which...Ketchup is releasing The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, because, although Warner might have given up on their animation projects, sometimes they turn out pretty good. And The Day the Earth Blew Up is not half-bad. Certainly, it has an interesting design sense, manages to keep the momentum going for the majority of its run-time, and does that enviable thing that few cartoons even try for these days: appealing to the adults while entertaining the kids. Sure, its basic plot is a compendium of sci-fi films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and even Deep Impact and Armageddon. But, every once in awhile, a character will make an off-hand remark or an aside that will genuinely make an adult spit-take their Coke-Zero. It's usually Daffy Duck.

Now, this Daffy is not the later Chuck Jones-version, vainglorious, craven and greedy, the antithesis of the cool, collected sneaky Bugs Bunny. This is the Daffy of the early cartoons, who was genuinely crazy and would often go off on a pin-wheeling, room-caroming fit of the hooting yips. That's because The Day the Earth Blew Up is done in the style of one of the most idiosyncratic of the Warner directors, Bob Clampett,* so the characters will look a bit "off" from modern interpretations, and they will be far more elastic as well. It will remind you of the animation of John Kricalfusi (the creator of "Ren and Stimpy")—a big fan of Clampett's style.

What happens is...a meteorite is spotted by an astronomer flying over the city of Grandview—home of the Goodie Gum Factory—and when he goes to investigate, he is overcome by glowing green goo and turned into a shambling zombie. The asteroid also puts a big hole in the roof of the home shared by Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, who were rescued as infants by Farmer Jim (who, curiously, is not very animated—comedically so—and is done in a painterly style like Thomas Hart Benton). Farmer Jim just...leaves one day (don't ask too many questions, kids!) and bequeaths their house to Porky and Daffy, and tells them they should always stick together. Easy to do in a town where the major industry is making bubble-gum.

That hole in the roof is pretty inconvenient, as the P and D have just done a once-over of their house for the "annual home standards review" and when the harridan of a mayor's wife comes to inspect, she gives them ten days to fix the hole or face demolition. But, without money to hire a contractor, they're forced to find a job, or—because of Daffy—a series of jobs that don't last very long.

Finally, they do get a job at the gum factory, where Daffy witnesses that zombie-astronomer drop that alien goo into a batch of the brand-new gum flavor "Super-Strongberry", which, when consumed, turns an ordinary person into a alien-controlled zombie. Daffy is put into a Qanon-like panic over the populace being taken over, but what he doesn't know is that it is all a plot by an alien invader trying to take over the mind of every human on Earth. Dastardly!

It's so over-the-top and done in an exaggerated almost horrific style that one can have a good time just watching the contortions of Daffy's and Porky's expressions as things transpire. This is not subtle stuff here, and every so often it is laugh-out-loud funny and that is tough to sustain in a feature-length cartoon.

Animation is a tricky business, and while the depicted spaceship is computer-generated, and some of the backgrounds have a pixelated feel, for the most part the film is plain old fashioned hand-drawn cartooning one frame at a time. You can spot some cost-cutting measures here and there, but the figures don't skimp, and some of the backgrounds have the reassuring weirdness of Maurice Noble from the old Warner days.

And it gets in a couple of digs at Warner management while doing so, which is right in the anarchic spirit of the Looney Tunes legacy. Maybe the execs should spend less time looking at their bottom line and looking at their product. At ten minutes, these things were classics. At feature length, they might be stretched a little thin (like chewing gum), but for a first time effort, this one does quite alright.

 

* Clampett had a long career at Warner, but he is perhaps better known for his creation of "Time for Beany" (the favorite show of both Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx) and its animated follow-up "Beany and Cecil".

 

 

Flow

Time and Tide

or

"Never Get Outta the Boat!"
 

It's a late entry, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Oscar for Best Animated Film goes to an obscure little film from Latvia, instead of the very well-funded projects out of Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks or other cartoon shops. Considering that it's been a very strong year for animation with Inside Out 2, Moana 2, The Wild Robot, and Robot Dreams, Flow, that film from Latvia stands a good chance of blowing those other films to pixelated smithereens.

 

One may initially be confused about the film because it begins with an almost ludicrous number of producing logos, which is more of a statement of how difficult it is to get a movie of this type funded (certainly harder than the other films mentioned above!). But the movie proper begins with a quiet image—a sable cat looks in a pool of water at its own reflection and ponders. One doesn't know how old the cat is—it looks and frequently acts young, but it has the instincts of a slightly more experienced older cat. It certainly doesn't stick around when it perceives a threat. But, here, it is looking and...reflecting.

Even in that first moment of story, the image impresses. Not so much photo-realistic, it gives the impression of reality with multiple planes of image—the water, what's under its surface, the reflection of the cat, and the canopy of foliage above it, slightly fading away with distance. It's impressive. One will get used to this level of detail, but every so often, one shakes one's head at the enormity of the world-building, complicated and verdant, that is going on by the animators.

The story is simple, conveyed with images and no anthropomorphized dialogue or clarifying narration, of a collection of animals trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth (or is it?) as it convulses with tidal shifts and unsure landscapes, with no clear goals other than existence. Maybe there's a shared understanding among the denizens of "we're all in this together" but it's of varying degree depending on the species and its instincts. There is not a human being to be seen, except in what they've left behind—like an abandoned house that the cat takes shelter in, drawn by the many carved cat statues that stand mid-caper in the yard.

There are other animals, of course. The river is teaming with fish. There are dogs of various breeds roaming in packs, wild deer—which the cat associates with impending disaster—birds, lemurs, capybaras. And a very large, almost prehistoric whale, which figures significantly. The cat has encounters with them—being a cat it has more to do with choice and tolerance than anything—and the wider scope of the story involves a journey, but one without any ultimate, agreed-upon destination, on a boat—another indication of previous human activity.

The boat provides some stability, the land and water being in a state of flux, and something of a safe harbor from the surrounding convulsions, and the encounters along the way with other animals, whether fellow passengers or fellow travelers, are new experiences which reveal character but makes no judgments. They are what they are, just as the landscape is what it is, which, in the animators' tools, is beautiful and wondrous, whether adhering to a slightly impressionistic realism or, as it does once, bordering on the surreal.

If one was crossing their arms and harrumphing about plausibilities, one might grump about an animal's (or bird's) ability to navigate with a rudder or figure out a life-saving mechanical maneuver, but for all the overwhelming evidence of behavioral realism, this is negligible. Nor is the messaging so precious that it can be seen as "Animal House"-lite; when the cat hurks up a hair-ball in front of an acquisitive lemur, I don't think of it as an anti-capitalist statement.

No, the story is pushed by behavior in the moment, simply, delicately, and subtley, reactive to the challenges of close-quarters and an evolving landscape.

I don't want to get too "The Theory of Everything" about this movie—everything does not need to be explained away or justified—however it's also a movie about learning, about process, about inter-connectedness, and ultimately, it's a picture about you and your reactions to it. How you respond and what story you see and what you take away from it (as such, I should say that to get the complete picture—literally—you need to stay through the credits as there's a last scene at the very tail end). Is there a journey's end? Not really. Not one that we're privy to, anyway.

 

As such, it's a film that makes you reflect and ponder.