Feature films have not been kind to the Looney Tunes. There was a time when the wacky adventures of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny and their animated pals were the best and funniest shorts on the silver screen, an era that lasted decades. But most of their longer movies were repackaged classic skits, thinly strung together by new bookend material based on whatever movie or TV show was hot at the time, like “Fantasy Island” or “Ghostbusters.” Then of course there were the “Space Jam” films, two of the most creatively bankrupt and shamelessly tacky brand exploitations in the history of [checks notes] everything.
Until now the only great “Looney Tunes” feature was the one that completely flopped, Joe Dante’s inspired and hilarious “Back in Action,” which smartly skewered the callow capitalism that made the “Space Jam” movies a cinematic crime. The new film, “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” is the characters’ first successful feature without any self-commentary about how Warner Bros. has failed them. Which is arguably a missed opportunity, since the other new Looney Tunes movie, Dave Green’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” was completely filmed and functionally deleted by the studio, along with multiple other films that deserved better on sheer principle.
There is no trade-off. The welcome development that “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is very good does not compensate for the loss of films like “Coyote vs. Acme,” but good cinema is good cinema, and deserves to be celebrated. The feature directorial debut of Peter Browngardt (“Uncle Grandpa”) is a gorgeously animated story about Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, both voiced by Eric Bauza, saving the Earth from an alien invasion. It’s not consistently hilarious but it is consistently imaginative, sometimes even breathtaking.
Porky and Daffy were found and adopted as babies by Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), a bizarrely-animated halcyon Americana figurehead who loves them both and endures their destructive looneyness. When Farmer Jim dies, in such an abstract way that children will likely struggle to follow the plot point at all, he leaves Porky and Daffy the family home. Cut to a few years later and they’ve really let the place go. If they can’t raise enough money to fix a giant hole in their roof — caused by a crash-landing UFO — their Homeowner’s Association will kick them out.
After a series of money-making misadventures (each of them wacky), Porky and Daffy get jobs at a bubblegum factory. While Porky romances their new scientist co-worker Petunia (Candi Milo), Daffy uncovers an alien plot to turn everyone in the world into mindless zombies with tainted chewing gum. So of course they have to put a stop to that — if they didn’t that would be a weird creative choice, even for a weird film like “The Day the Earth Blew Up.”
Peter Browngardt’s debut is a 1950s sci-fi throwback paying homage to classic Looney Tunes and classic genre films like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (naturally), “The Thing from Another World” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The animation style evokes favorable comparisons to Max Fleischer and Don Bluth, with jaw-dropping background and fluid, energetic, expressive movement. It’s the prettiest animated movie Warner Bros. has released since “The Iron Giant,” which would make for a formidable double feature.
“The Day the Earth Blew Up” also harkens back to the era when beloved children’s movies were, frequently, genuinely upsetting. There are scenes of chewing gum monsters in Browngardt’s film that are good old-fashioned nightmare fuel, the kind of brief, absolute horror that inevitably becomes a defining generational moment for any children who survive it. The “Stop the Boat” scene from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” the donkey transformation in “Pinocchio,” the Great Owl from “The Secret of NIMH,” they should make some room in the clubhouse — there’s a new member to induct.
Don’t worry, only a small percentage is pure terror. Most of the time “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is a blast, sometimes quite literally. I’m not sure when the filmmakers realized that animating Petunia Pig with a flamethrower like she’s Chow Yun-fat in “Hard Boiled” was pure cinematic gold, but I’m glad they did, and they sure did do it a lot. This movie did not, as they say, need to go/boil that hard, but hard indeed they did go/boil.
The only real drawback is that “The Day the Earth Blew Up’s” actual sense of humor is mostly conceptual, with most jokes evoking an appreciative grin instead of an actual, audible laugh. That’s not even a quibble, it’s just an observation. “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” remains the funniest feature in the franchise but “The Day the Earth Blew Up” has enough striking imagery and creative zeal that it stands out, and stands proudly. If this is what the animators at Warner Bros. are cooking up these days, one can only imagine how great “Coyote vs. Acme” might also have been. (We’ll just have to keep imagining it. Probably forever.)
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