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A Burst of Long-Awaited Looney Energy

The Looney Tunes are an essential cultural institution that simply must be preserved. That is evidently not the outlook of the studio that created them, Warner Bros., under the auspices of David Zaslav, who is seemingly hellbent on keeping the brand from getting any kind of footing in the modern media landscape. He canceled the release of Coyote vs. Acme, a film that was fully finished, to claim as a tax write-off and similarly pulled the plug on the release of The Day the Earth Blew Up, a spin-off movie of the Looney Tunes Cartoons series pushed to the recesses of HBO Max. This resulted in the unthinkable: a Looney Tunes project, a brand more associated with Warner Bros. than anything else, being shopped around to other distributors because its parent doesn’t see its value anymore. Ketchup Entertainment picked it up and even financed a theatrical distribution, making this little project designed for streaming that ever elusive thing in the modern film landscape -a 2D animated feature in theatres.
For that alone, it’s got a lot of people rooting for it. But The Day the Earth Blew Up is also just an interesting foray into feature narrative storytelling carried by Looney Tunes characters -and not the whole cast, just a select few. These characters have never really had this opportunity, Looney Tunes movies in the past having been either largely compilations of pre-existing shorts stitched together or vehicles in which they’ve co-starred with live-action actors in narratives very far removed from what the Looney Tunes did best. So this film is curiously rather new territory, at least on this scale, for the ninety year-old brand.
It envisions Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) as brothers raised together by the Paul Bunyan-like Farmer Jim who left his home to them one day which now exists in disrepair surrounded by a city. In order to keep and fix the home that has great emotional meaning for the pair, they wind up getting jobs at a bubblegum factory at the same time that a mad alien scientist is using mind-controlling bubblegum to gradually take over the world. Eventually Porky and Daffy become the only ones who can stop it. A novel concept.
Daffy and Porky have historically made for a great double-act in Looney Tunes cartoons; although I and perhaps most are more familiar with their dynamic from a string of Chuck Jones cartoons from the 1950s like Duck Dodgers, Drip-Along Daffy, and Robin Hood Daffy, in which an arrogant, scheming but sarcastic Daffy is paired with a good-natured but dimwitted Porky to observe his partners’ foibles. But the relationship in The Day the Earth Blew Up draws more on the earlier incarnations of the characters as depicted by Bob Clampett in the 1930s and 40s, where Porky was more of a reasonably intelligent everyman and Daffy was just a big ball of chaos (versions that incidentally both predated the inception of Bugs Bunny in any form). These versions of the characters are recaptured very well, along with a tone to the humour that prioritizes silliness over sharpness (I generally preferred the latter in Looney Tunes, but there's nothing wrong with the former).
The movie is peppered with gags that wouldn't be out of place in one of those old cartoons, if modified occasionally to a modern context. The best of them has to be Farmer Jim, rendered entirely as a still painting but with moving eyes and lips, except for one critical shot where he is fully animated. It is both a charming call-back to those days of animation limitations and a really funny effect in its own right. A lot of the comedy is energized and bombastic in a different way to the old cartoons though, mimicking a certain elastic flamboyance common of a lot of kids shows today. It's flashy, to put it another way. But it is also a clear melding of the classic and new sensibilities -the people who made this movie are certainly fans of the Looney Tunes, their aesthetics, style, and history.
This effect in the humour isn’t totally consistent; the movie is never able to reach that killer gag-a-minute formula of the old cartoons, and the cinematic runtime probably accounts for some of that. These characters work in small bursts of sketches -it’s hard to construct a full-length narrative around them. As such, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a very segmented movie -which has some positives, such as Daffy’s singular paranoia at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers situation being put to bed in short order by Porky and Petunia Pig -obviously Porky’s love interest and subtle threat to his relationship with Daffy- learning the truth of the monstrous bubblegum relatively early. On the other hand, there is a second climax with a wholly new set of circumstances from what the bulk of the movie had been building to and it never feels entirely organic -indeed it comes across as a mere bait and switch to keep the movie running another twenty minutes and give Daffy in particular just a little bit more catharsis. The motivating factor of their house also loses focus for a stretch of this.
But while plot may be the film's biggest weakness, abject silliness is its strength, and if nothing else it's detours keep things colourful and fresh. This movie absolutely could not be knocked for a lack of creativity, and barring a couple exceptions (including some pop tunes) thankfully keeps the nature of its humour very timeless. Guided by the zaniness of these character archetypes and a general tone that takes nothing seriously, there’s much to have fun with. The 2D format is definitely put to good use, this movie would not feel so alive or manic in standard 3D animation (especially if it looked anything like in Space Jam: A New Legacy). It needs the kind of abstract broadness this aesthetic provides. Indeed, the movie proves well enough there’s still a vacant space for traditional animation and its particular capacity of expressiveness that newer animation styles can’t match.
The Day the Earth Blew Up is quietly subversive. In its 50s sci-fi invocations, its lack of interest in commercial appeal, and its refusal to play any brand media game vis a vis filling the film with cameos or suggesting a broader universe. It really is just like a series of interlinked Looney Tunes sketches with some base character arcs running through. It is a very pleasing movie to watch and a fun one too, if doesn’t exactly recapture the spirit and style of the classics. A love of silly animation is plastered all over it and informs it. A charming work of cartoon chaos.

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