(SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS!!!)
I, like so much of America's population, grew up watching Looney Tunes. Those old classic cartoons are just about the only thing that I find just as funny now as I did when I was three, if not more so. When I walked into "Looney Tunes Back In Action" I realized that the people behind it were mere pretenders to the Chuck Jones throne. I braced myself for the fact that it might suck. Didn't matter. I consider myself an animation buff, and this was a Looney Tunes movie, a tribute to the funniest cartoons ever made.
I sat down, suffered through what seemed like three hours worth of ads (this was an AMC theater) and then, when the film began, I proceeded to grin like a loon for ninety minutes.
The film had everything. Terrific animation, direction and special effects that combined the live action and animation seamlessly, a breakneck speed that almost topped the original cartoons, and most of all great writing. When Jenna Elfman's character reminds Warner execs that her combined movies have grossed $950,000, their Simpsonian response is "That's not a billion." In a restaurant scene, Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzales lament the need to be PC while Shaggy and Scooby give Matthew Lilliard a deserved chewing-out. And having the villain be the head of the ACME corporation was a brilliant touch, and casting Steve Martin for the role was icing on the cake.
Brendan Fraser and Elfman do what they're there for, no more, no less. They set up the comedic pins for Bugs and Daffy to knock down. The cartoons are the true stars here, especially Daffy, who after decades of getting his beak blown off finally gets the chance to play the hero. I loved that the writers were able to find the perfect blend between the Bob Clampett "Woo-Hoo, Whoo-Hoo" duck and the Chuck Jones "You're Dithpicable" duck. And the voices are as dead-on as possible with Mel Blanc dead. I still slightly prefer Billy West's Bugs voice (in Space Jam) to Joe Alaskey's, but this is a minor quibble.
Early on, when I heard that Eric Goldberg would be directing the animation, my trust in the project skyrocketed. Goldberg was the supervising animator of the Genie in Aladdin, a film which Jones himself called the funniest feature ever made. If there's anyone up to the job of remaking the Tunes for the new milloonium, it's him.
The film's piece de resistance, however, is a sequence that takes place in the Louvre in Paris, in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through all the paintings, and as they run they take on the styles of Dali, Munch and Seurat among others. The scene's cultural knowledge recalls Chuck Jones in the best way.
With the exception of this scene (and perhaps without even that exception), the film does not aspire to be high art. It merely aspires to be fun, and succeeds triumphantly. It's definitely the best "classic cartoon characters interacting with live actors" movie since Roger Rabbit; it's far funnier and more focused than Space Jam, and it contains none of the saccharine lesson-learning that ruined The Adventures of Rocky And Bullwinkle. It's just plain fun.
There is the mandatory product placement, but even that is given its due for the film's never-ending speil of mockery: "It was sure nice of Wal-Mart to give us all this free Wal-Mart stuff in return for saying Wal-Mart so much." Some people have complained about this, but I say that the filmmakers are simply having their cake and eating it too. These same complainers pointed out that the film is chock full of cross-references to other Warner products like Scooby Doo and Batman. The fact is, after seeing this film I didn't want to see the next Batman movie, or suffer through the Scooby Doo sequel, or (shudder) shop at Wal-Mart any more than I did before the previews ended. Maybe I'm the exception rather than the rule, but I think companies who pay to have their products in movies are, for the most part, wasting their money.
This leads me to the bane of my existence: Bloody Critics, or BCs. Some of these reviews are from people who just didn't get it, and those reviews I can brush off. But the worst ones are from those who claim to be animation buffs, who for the most part rallied against the cheapening of the great works of art that were the original Chuck Jones cartoons. The kinds of people who took college courses that study these cartoons because they were too lazy for a real literature course. The people who hold Chuck Jones to be sacred, who consider it blasphemy to leave "What's Opera Doc" off the recent DVD set.
I say, these BCs have lost sight of something very important. Even though Chuck Jones would occasionally make a cartoon which made you think as well as laugh (Duck Amuck, What's Opera Doc, One Froggy Evening), I would say at least 75% of his output did not have such high aspirations, and was simply meant to be entertaining and fun. Occasionally they would make cartoons that spoofed Wagner and other classics, but more often they would spoof then- current pop-cultural entities like Buck Rogers and Errol Flynn. Look at those Road Runner cartoons: they're pretty much all the same! But does it matter? Of course not. What matters is how fun they are, and how much you laugh. I say, the same principle applies to this film. The film contains innumerable references to recent pop culture, and perhaps the best one of all is a shot of Bugs catching a fish and saying "Hey, whaddaya know - I found Nemo!" If you can't just sit back and laugh at that, and yet you consider yourself an animation buff, I shake my head and wonder why.
I, like so much of America's population, grew up watching Looney Tunes. Those old classic cartoons are just about the only thing that I find just as funny now as I did when I was three, if not more so. When I walked into "Looney Tunes Back In Action" I realized that the people behind it were mere pretenders to the Chuck Jones throne. I braced myself for the fact that it might suck. Didn't matter. I consider myself an animation buff, and this was a Looney Tunes movie, a tribute to the funniest cartoons ever made.
I sat down, suffered through what seemed like three hours worth of ads (this was an AMC theater) and then, when the film began, I proceeded to grin like a loon for ninety minutes.
The film had everything. Terrific animation, direction and special effects that combined the live action and animation seamlessly, a breakneck speed that almost topped the original cartoons, and most of all great writing. When Jenna Elfman's character reminds Warner execs that her combined movies have grossed $950,000, their Simpsonian response is "That's not a billion." In a restaurant scene, Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzales lament the need to be PC while Shaggy and Scooby give Matthew Lilliard a deserved chewing-out. And having the villain be the head of the ACME corporation was a brilliant touch, and casting Steve Martin for the role was icing on the cake.
Brendan Fraser and Elfman do what they're there for, no more, no less. They set up the comedic pins for Bugs and Daffy to knock down. The cartoons are the true stars here, especially Daffy, who after decades of getting his beak blown off finally gets the chance to play the hero. I loved that the writers were able to find the perfect blend between the Bob Clampett "Woo-Hoo, Whoo-Hoo" duck and the Chuck Jones "You're Dithpicable" duck. And the voices are as dead-on as possible with Mel Blanc dead. I still slightly prefer Billy West's Bugs voice (in Space Jam) to Joe Alaskey's, but this is a minor quibble.
Early on, when I heard that Eric Goldberg would be directing the animation, my trust in the project skyrocketed. Goldberg was the supervising animator of the Genie in Aladdin, a film which Jones himself called the funniest feature ever made. If there's anyone up to the job of remaking the Tunes for the new milloonium, it's him.
The film's piece de resistance, however, is a sequence that takes place in the Louvre in Paris, in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through all the paintings, and as they run they take on the styles of Dali, Munch and Seurat among others. The scene's cultural knowledge recalls Chuck Jones in the best way.
With the exception of this scene (and perhaps without even that exception), the film does not aspire to be high art. It merely aspires to be fun, and succeeds triumphantly. It's definitely the best "classic cartoon characters interacting with live actors" movie since Roger Rabbit; it's far funnier and more focused than Space Jam, and it contains none of the saccharine lesson-learning that ruined The Adventures of Rocky And Bullwinkle. It's just plain fun.
There is the mandatory product placement, but even that is given its due for the film's never-ending speil of mockery: "It was sure nice of Wal-Mart to give us all this free Wal-Mart stuff in return for saying Wal-Mart so much." Some people have complained about this, but I say that the filmmakers are simply having their cake and eating it too. These same complainers pointed out that the film is chock full of cross-references to other Warner products like Scooby Doo and Batman. The fact is, after seeing this film I didn't want to see the next Batman movie, or suffer through the Scooby Doo sequel, or (shudder) shop at Wal-Mart any more than I did before the previews ended. Maybe I'm the exception rather than the rule, but I think companies who pay to have their products in movies are, for the most part, wasting their money.
This leads me to the bane of my existence: Bloody Critics, or BCs. Some of these reviews are from people who just didn't get it, and those reviews I can brush off. But the worst ones are from those who claim to be animation buffs, who for the most part rallied against the cheapening of the great works of art that were the original Chuck Jones cartoons. The kinds of people who took college courses that study these cartoons because they were too lazy for a real literature course. The people who hold Chuck Jones to be sacred, who consider it blasphemy to leave "What's Opera Doc" off the recent DVD set.
I say, these BCs have lost sight of something very important. Even though Chuck Jones would occasionally make a cartoon which made you think as well as laugh (Duck Amuck, What's Opera Doc, One Froggy Evening), I would say at least 75% of his output did not have such high aspirations, and was simply meant to be entertaining and fun. Occasionally they would make cartoons that spoofed Wagner and other classics, but more often they would spoof then- current pop-cultural entities like Buck Rogers and Errol Flynn. Look at those Road Runner cartoons: they're pretty much all the same! But does it matter? Of course not. What matters is how fun they are, and how much you laugh. I say, the same principle applies to this film. The film contains innumerable references to recent pop culture, and perhaps the best one of all is a shot of Bugs catching a fish and saying "Hey, whaddaya know - I found Nemo!" If you can't just sit back and laugh at that, and yet you consider yourself an animation buff, I shake my head and wonder why.