What I've Been Into...
"Coyote vs. Acme." The co-joining of animated characters with real-life humans has always held a fascination for film audiences, from Walt Disney's "Alice" comedies in the 1920s to "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" and "Mary Poppins" in the 1960s to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in the 1980s. It's fun to see what happens when the rubbery antics and freedom of the animated world mesh with the unforgiving physics of our own.
"Coyote vs. Acme" plays entertainingly with these interactions while also poking fun at our lawyered-up society and the manipulations of Big Business and the tech industry. The effects used to bring Wile E. Coyote, the Roadrunner, Porky Pig and other characters into the third dimension are impressive, but don't draw undue attention to themselves. The focus is on the characters and their story.
Based on a humorous short by Ian Frazier published in The New Yorker back in 1990, the opening scenes of the film note the many backfires and catastrophes that befall Wile E. Coytote when he attempts to use Acme products to capture or kill the Roadrunner. Is the problem user error or the products in use? His attention captured by one of those "have you been injured?" law firm ads on TV, the Coyote decides to sue.
Will Forte is deadpan funny throughout as Wile E.'s hapless attorney, Kevin. Playing straight man to a cartoon can't be easy, but he pulls it off as easily as if he'd been exchanging lines with a top-notch comic. This is especially impressive when you take into account that the Coyote doesn't even talk. He merely holds up signs voicing his lines.
These references to the old Warner Bros. tropes is a lot of fun and makes the film play like an actual Looney Tune while also functioning as a commentary on them. There are lots of imaginative and witty callbacks to the original shorts. In one very short, very funny scene, for example, the problematic Pepé Le Pew is quickly me-too-ed straight off the screen.
Other characters just as funny as their cartoon foils include John Cena as the villainous Acme attorney, Buddy Crane, and Martha Kelly as Kevin's dour, ditzy office colleague, Dottie Jones.
I enjoyed the film much more than I thought I might, and I'd even see it again at some point. My only real complaint is that the makers overlooked some important folks when paying tribute to the original animated shorts. There are references to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, of course, but I didn't see any shoutouts to Mel Blanc, Carl Stalling or others who deserve credit for making the old Looney Tunes so memorable.
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The Comics Journal chats with former DC Comics Design Director Richard Bruning.
1985 was a really interesting time to be coming into DC Comics, because they were heading into their big relaunch of the company with Crisis on Infinite Earths, and at the same time planning their rollout of Dark Knight. How did either of those things affect the work that you were being asked to do?
I am the luckiest guy in comics as far as I'm concerned. I walked in while they were building Dark Knight and Watchmen. I got to play with both of them very, very intimately, as it were. One of the first meetings I had was with Frank [Miller] at Chicago Comicon a few months after I started, and we sat down and started kicking ideas back and forth about how to do Dark Knight differently than a regular comic book. Frank had already argued for doing the prestige format with a square spine. Dark Knight was the first time DC used that format.
Alan [Moore] and Dave [Gibbons] had finished the first couple of issues of Watchmen. I had realized that Watchmen was going to come out like a regular floppy comic with the staples on the side, but it was going to have an ad flat in it. And I said, “You can't put a fucking ad flat in this book. Every page is just too perfect.” It was so well thought out, and so considered, that on the flight after San Diego Comic Con, I convinced Dick Giordano to take the ad flat out of there. I had to come up with something to do with the back of the book, because now we had eight pages to fill. I got to work with Dave and Alan on creating those back features, which were unique to each issue.
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