The merry-go-round broke down

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE

2025

Directed by Pete Browngardt

Written by many many many people, including Pete Browngardt

Spoilers: moderate

Coming from the edge of oblivion, we have The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie—the first ever to be "a movie that is, also, a legitimate Looney Tune," though it's the fourth counting the trio of live-action hybrid films—which wasn't supposed to be in theaters, to the extent the company that made it ever wanted you to see it at all: it's been a long hard road into the light for the movie, which began development ages ago and had completed production, I presume, no later than August 2022, when it had intended to be released as a streaming original on the Warners platform, Max.  The absorption of WarnerMedia by Discovery resulted (amongst many other bad things) in The Day the Earth Blew Up being cast off into limbo, at that time the film being the lesser-known of two Looney Tunes movies to be buried by the new regime, though it was not stricken down as thoroughly as Coyote vs. Acme.  (I'll simply say, on that subject, that it's perverse that a film can be shelved as a tax write-off, without its owner being required to abandon the film's copyright, so as to make real their claim of the "destruction" of their asset's value.  That said: I don't think Coyote vs. Acme sounds that good, either.  It sounds, rather, like an SNL skit, or at least it's hard to imagine how its premise, "cartoon character enters a live-action world to engage in litigation because the products he used in his seven-minute shorts were unsafe," could possibly be scaffolded out into a feature-length film.)

Anyway, this one's fate was different.  It was saved by Ketchup, a small-fry distribution company, and I'm glad this happened, even if it was risky (after two weekends, this movie with a budget of $15 million has only just now grossed its budget).  It's going to become, and indeed already has become, the kind of movie that gets moralized about online by more people than actually went to go see the fucking thing.  There are elements of Warners' attitude towards the 94 year and 11 month-old bundle of animation properties we call "the Looney Tunes" that are, I'm afraid, comprehensible.  It's not, of course, comprehensible why Max would remove the entirety of Warners' classic, wholly-owned 1930-1969 Looney Tunes from their service.  All that does is vindicate my own, personal physical media hoarding, for you, in your cheap entitlement and your tidier homes, will live your life in the darkness when the streaming stops, and you'll have no art but what you can construct out of the grass you don't know how to braid and the mud you don't know how to bake and the pigments you don't know how to refine.  You'll look up and ask if I'll let you borrow the one with "One Froggy Evening," and I'll look down and whisper, "no."

I've digressed.  The part of Warners' hostility that is comprehensible is not being keen on betting money on theatrically-released feature-length Looney Tunes cartoons, for while the Looney Tunes are, objectively, an august and venerable institution, they are maybe not that actually popular; or, if you'll follow me, they're not popular in the way it takes for a theatrically-released movie to be a financial success (for neither is theatrical hand-drawn animation especially popular in America).  And I can't imagine flogging the Looney Tunes through a capitalist dada horrorshow like Space Jam: A New Legacy was apt to make them moreso.

That's all backstory, and here's a little more: the movie itself (which I think readily escapes run-of-the-mill IPsploitation) is the brainchild of Pete Browngardt, the main guy behind the Looney Tunes Cartoons (which remains on Max at present time, go figure), a series that kicked off in 2019 and, I'll tell you, has the damnedest set of priors.  It feels like... the extremely abrasive version would be "Looney Tunes made by people who have never seen a post-1941 Chuck Jones cartoon," and I don't want to be that abrasive, because the ones I've seen are mostly good and funny, and they have seen Chuck Jones cartoons, because they brought back Claude Cat, which also means they specifically like the same Jones shorts I do.

The more accurate version, then, would involve detailing how they're Looney Tunes that don't seem to be inspired as much by the late 40s and 50s, what most think of as "the peak," as they are the early 40s (which admittedly is thought of as "steadily approaching the peak"), and so, more specifically, they're taking as their touchstones the comedy styles of Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, plus some Tex Avery, rather than the styles of Chuck Jones, later Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson.  But then, more than any single one of those names, the aesthetic touchstone is grotesque Nickelodeon animation from the late 90s, inasmuch as you couldn't go through a whole Looney Tunes Cartoons short without snapping your fingers and exclaiming, "oh, they think Bob Clampett is Jon Kricfalusi."  Which isn't that nuts, and there's a philosophical problem here, too: "do new Looney Tunes actually have to be exactly like the old stuff? must they hew precisely to a simulacrum of Chuck Jones, or whoever?", and the answer is obviously "God, no, it can and should be its own thing, with its own innovations resting atop its own collection of influences, and Ren & Stimpy is as proper as anything else."  But from what I've seen I don't think it's all that possible to parse out the distinctions between, say, David Gimmell and Ryan Kramer, two of the more prolific actual directors on the program, and it might rise to the level of "problem" that there is such an intense sameness to Browngardt's show.  Meanwhile, it's a purely personal "problem," but there's always something about Looney Tunes done in digital ink-and-paint (with rack focus, Lord), rather than handicraft and photomechanical reproduction, that feels slightly off.

Definitely rising to the level of "problem" is that it can feel "of streaming," sometimes egregiously—there's a penchant of explaining visual gags like a Looney Tunes radio play, as if, mayhap, you might be on your fucking phone, which might be behind the real problem with Looney Tunes Cartoons, which is that it offers a surfeit of funny, gross, and even well-animated cartoon shorts that have pretty basic layout and very boring backgrounds, so this is where "Looney Tunes, classics of comedy! they have such funny jokes!" crashes into the brick wall of "no, the important thing is that they are art objects built from a series of aesthetically-aggressive background paintings, through which characters move by way of thrilling layout choices with meticulously-controlled timing," and of course these things aren't truly at odds, whereas even great Looney Tunes shorts sometimes have one but not the other; but having both is best.  "Aesthetically-aggressive backgrounds" for the show means overindulging in Clampetty "BOLD SWATCH OF COLOR" abstractness for every close-up, which isn't the exclamation point it thinks it is when a lot of Looney Tunes Cartoons already reads as "visibly cheap."

This is an unnecessarily bruising way of getting to this: The Day the Earth Blew Up addresses all these issues, maybe because it wasn't that cheap, but maybe even more because Browngardt took on the task of making the one true Looney Tunes movie with the appropriate sense of grave solemnity (of the kind that translates into zany slapstick, of course), as well as an appreciation for the freedom his expanded canvas offered; and, nevertheless, most of these issues with Browngardt's show are still issues with Browngardt's movie.

But we do have a movie, and whatever else, it doesn't have Coyote vs. Acme's "clever, but not an actual movie premise" problem.  So: the concept we're running with for this film is that Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both Eric Bauza) are adoptive foundling brothers raised by a certain Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), and in one of the film's subtlest, most just-plain-likeable jokes, this clearly happened ninety years ago, based on how the farm was a farm then, and it's suburban sprawl now; the much more in-your-face joke is that Farmer Jim is a virtually-immobile background painting—with extremely limited animated flourish—around which the fully-animated young duck and pig grow up, and I decided at this early stage that I was in good hands, though it's also the part where it most forcefully muddles "who's Bob Clampett?" with "I think you mean Jon Kricfalusi, or the people who make Spongebob," something also noticeable in every drawing of anyone's eyes doing anything across the entire movie.  The upshot, anyway, is that Daffy and Porky are slackers who have remained bound to their increasingly-dilapidated house their entire lives, charged by Farmer Jim with looking after the home as well as one another; but an inspection visit by a remarkably-pneumatic busybody from the code office (Laraine Newman) coincides with a recent disaster, a giant hole in the roof that they hadn't noticed until she pointed it out.  What we know and they don't is that this hole was caused by an alien ship smashing through it on its way to a crash-landing, whereupon its occupant possessed a human astronomer (also Tatasciore).

As for right now, though, Porky and Daffy have realized they have to get jobs, and after a rather superb montage-based run through roughly a dozen gigs, they find their calling at the gum factory at the invitation of Petunia Pig (Candi Milo), a radical gum scientist frustrated with her unimaginative employer's constant repackaging of old gum flavors as new (er...), but otherwise friendly, and especially towards Porky.  But soon Daffy discovers that the aforementioned possessed scientist has impregnated the hotly-anticipated, newly-rebranded gum with alien gook, in a body-snatching bid to control the whole world at the behest of his extraterrestrial master (Peter MacNicol).

This is one astoundingly tight plot for a Looney Tunes movie, and it mostly benefits from having it—shorts and features aren't the same thing, after all—and it's maybe just as astounding that they restrained themselves to one single plot that basically every major joke is required to tie into, rather than a multi-threaded anthology with a bunch of Looney Tunes characters (which is what Tiny Toon Adventures did when they went feature-length).  Building it around Daffy and Porky makes sense from first principles—they're the protagonists with the biggest history of "teaming up" already—though it's probably no accident that the Looney Tunes Cartoons' Porky and Daffy shorts are obviously its best, to the extent at least two of them don't even have the problems I was bitching about above, and are just "great Looney Tunes albeit done in Browngardt's peculiar and highly-divergent style."  But I do also mean it is "a Daffy and Porky cartoon": notwithstanding Petunia, this movie has no other Looney Tunes characters period, not even as cameos, which is something of an outright miracle.  It's so disciplined that this Looney Tunes movie, about an alien invasion, refuses to even use Marvin the freaking Martian, and it also refuses to make "Duck Dodgers" references because it's too invested in the integrity of its 50s-style sci-fi thriller.  I think all of this is honorable as hell, even if this also means that the cutaways to the never-named invader (based visually on Invasion of the Saucer-Men but conceptually more akin to Venture Bros. writing put on autopilot) turn out to be the film's worst material, amounting to aimless-feeling asides revolving around the invader berating the dumb mind-controlled scientist in ways that trivialize the threat—yes, I hear myself, but it actually matters when it's this plotty—and without any of the iconic insouciance of your Marvin shorts.  (Plus MacNicol is offering by far the weakest performance, doing this Cobra Commander thing, in a manner that I was incredibly sure while watching it that it must've been Bauza, so what I was going to complain about was how he kept lapsing into his spittling, lithpy Daffy Duck voice.  But it's an entirely different dude, so there's not even that much excuse.)

The villain is as good an avenue as any to start talking how The Day the Earth Blew Up looks, given that his alien spacecraft is the major plank of "crazy design" we have and while it's not completely unimaginative, it's very gray-on-gray, for starters, and tops out at "I dunno, floating ovoid stairs."  The quotidian small town spaces honestly have more creativity going into them, including the decaying wreck of the house (a solid frame-based gag to show us where Daffy sleeps, for instance).  But all of it is only ever extremely-lightly-impressionist digital paintings of relatively normal stuff that they're going too far out of their way to make sure you realize is visibly "brushstroked," and there's only a few exceptions that demonstrate more is attainable.  Fittingly enough, I guess, they all attend to the gum factory: an abstract musical number about how surprisingly non-incompetent Porky and Daffy have proven themselves to be at pressing a button and pulling a lever, respectively, which either interpolates, or else adjoining pieces of the score had interpolated, some "Powerhouse B" (Daffy also wears his "Baby Bottleneck" hat); what delighted me even more was a startling thriller pursuit of the scientist undertaken by Daffy through the single Chuck Jonesiest (or rather, Maurice Noblest) thing here by leagues, including a fantastic "whoa, is that some angular geometry you got there?" stairway chase.  (Part of this chase also involves a prehensile eye gag that just about does hit Clampett levels with its actual punchline, which isn't only "Daffy Duck's eyes are prehensile and can go around corners."  It occurs to me that maybe I ought to define what I mean by "Clampett" and "not Clampett": Browngardt's approach is mostly just "it's funny if it's disgusting"—to be clear, I like that too!—and that can occasionally brute force its way into "Clampett"; but Bob Clampett's best shorts have true demented malevolence to them, a sensation of feverishly working out horrifying ideas about what cartoons are capable of that don't even necessarily make "trying to be funny" their primary goal.  Browngardt, generally, shows his hand.  He is trying to be funny, and he never pursues the dangerous, overloaded mania that Clampett enjoyed—though, hell, sometimes he can find a sensation of dangerousness anyway.  For instance, when Daffy tongue-wrestles the alien gum.)

But hey, at least there are layouts in The Day the Earth Blew Up, rather than physical comedy in a single cramped angle, and even if these are more like what a live-action comedy might get up to, they're well-built for funny movement and more dramatic, action-oriented movement.  (That said, I think this movie, twenty years after Chicken Little, proves that no matter how irresistible "The End of the World As We Know It" is to a sci-fi comedy cartoon, it simply cannot be used well.)  As for the character animation, it's swell, frequently devoted to the freakish deformations that are never more than a few seconds away for everybody, but always very fluid, enjoyable, and charismatic stuff, especially for Porky and Petunia.  Bauza's vital on that last count, too: he's got a pretty much flawless Daffy that's got one foot in the "looney"* of his early 40s madcap days, and the other in the "arrogant, self-serving, stupid prick" of the more-definitive later Daffy; his Porky might be even better.  It's a very distinctive take on the pig, seemingly invented just for this movie; but it comes off as true to Porky, in his mildly-dumb-but-smarter-than-Daffy straightman earnestness.  And what of the stutter, which he shares with Petunia (also a classic character, but barely, and apparently substantially rejiggered from the "injury sponge" conception that Looney Tunes Cartoons deployed)?  It's tuh-tuh-tuh, uh, great.

And then there is Petunia, who has such a weirdly well-crafted character, between her highly-specific conception and Milo's performance.  "Porky Pig winds up in such a credible and sweet romance that I honestly considered adding that genre to the tags" is very obviously not a box a Looney Tunes movie ever needed to check; but it's awfully nice, anyway.  That it has fully two "emotional arcs" is, I suppose, just how feature-length storytelling was always going to shake out, but in the second case it's thankfully almost solely making fun of itself.  It's not that Daffy and Porky don't have an emotional dynamic, which even sort of plays; but it is a pure joke, manifesting in possibly the movie's best pure jokes in the climax, involving some sublimely literal ideas regarding "crying a river."

At the end of the day, that's what it is, a joke machine.  So is it funny?  Yes, and that it gets that out of a proper-feeling genre plot is pretty outstanding.  You'd think I'd rate it higher, except as heroic as it is—"making a Looney Tunes movie, that really is an actual movie, out of characters that were created to support vignettes of no greater than eight minutes"—the minimum modern feature length turned out to still be a bridge too far, and so eventually we arrive at a perfect (and beautifully cruel) natural ending point, such as any self-respecting classic Looney Tune would have taken, and I believe this Looney Tunes movie would have, too; but unfortunately that was still fifteen minutes too short.  It's a bummer how annoyingly "over" the movie feels afterwards—gracious, it's wrapped up both of those emotional arcs already, this Looney Tunes movie has—though even here, there remain good gags.  It's where this movie has elected to place its "silhouette of an audience member, disgusted with the show, yells at the screen" gag.  That's amazing.  It's something you can see in an actual theater, if you hurry.

Score: 7/10

*A word this screenplay uses to insist upon its own funniness at least five times, or four times too many, and, if not five, then because they use "screwy" once, too.