Toons Have Seldom Been Loonier Than in “Coyote vs. Acme”

In the 1952 “Looney Tunes” short “Operation: Rabbit,” Bugs Bunny encounters another member of the cartoon-critter pantheon. “Allow me to introduce myself,” the figure says, brandishing a business card. “My name is Wile E. Coyote, Genius.” It wasn’t quite the character’s first appearance—he’d made his début three years earlier, chasing the Road Runner, in “Fast and Furry-ous” (1949)—but it was the first time he’d been given a name and the gift of words (delivered by the voice actor Mel Blanc). The name would stick; the words would fade. Bugs, with his carrot-chomping patter, naturally brought out the character’s talkative side in their occasional matchups. But it was the Road Runner who swiftly became Wile E. Coyote’s nemesis, and they shared a commitment to muteness—“Beep-beep!” notwithstanding—that gave their hunter-and-hunted dynamic a primal undertow. They didn’t need dialogue to define them, especially since their chases played out to such an expressive soundtrack of crashes and booms—the music of a predator’s disastrously ill-advised attempts to capture his prey.

One of the modest but telling charms of “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new feature-length comedy from the director Dave Green and the screenwriter Samy Burch, is that the eponymous canine never breaks his vow of silence—a nod to tradition that also serves a narrative purpose. In a story that draws loose inspiration from Ian Frazier’s brilliant humor piece “Coyote v. Acme,” which was published in this magazine in 1990, Wile E. Coyote needs someone who can speak on his behalf. He finds that someone in Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a bumbling personal-injury lawyer from Albuquerque, who reluctantly agrees to represent him in a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation, the manufacturer of the many, many products that his client has ordered by mail over the years to help catch the Road Runner, to worse than no avail. The movie’s early passages are an epic ode to buyer’s remorse, reminding us, with a mix of newly shot action scenes and excerpts from classic “Looney Tunes” shorts, that every one of the plaintiff’s Acme purchases—they include rocket-powered roller skates, electromagnetic gloves, tiny slingshots, enormous catapults, and anvils and explosives galore—has malfunctioned and backfired, with hilariously punishing results.

For all that, Kevin—whose law practice is named for the Warner Bros. animation legends Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese—doesn’t think his client, whom he addresses as Wile E., has much of a case. Especially against a mega-conglomerate like Acme, which is variably described as “the biggest corporation in the world” and “a family-values company that values its family . . . of companies.” Kevin, hapless and lazy, is no match for Acme’s army of super-slick lawyers, who are led by Buddy Crane, a heavyweight in every sense; he’s played, with beefy swagger, by the actor and former professional wrestler John Cena. But Kevin is fortunate to have an ambitious intern, Paige (Lana Condor)—she’s also his niece—who takes one look at Wile E.’s sky-high pile of Acme junk and sees not just a damning mountain of evidence but also signs of a sinister conspiracy. The film, blending animation and live-action footage, takes the form of a detective story, following such precursors in this hybrid medium as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (2003). Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise, but the slight slackness of structure has the benefit of being able to accommodate an array of “Looney Tunes” characters in bit parts, with narrative priority for the birds: here’s Daffy Duck as a fount of mournfully deranged backstory, Tweety as a kind of diminutive double agent—a canary trap—and, most effectively, Foghorn Leghorn as a preening, menacing Acme overlord.

The revelations hinge, unsurprisingly, on a cruel double standard in the ways humans and toons are treated. In a richer version of the story, the dubious codes and customs of this animation-apartheid society might themselves have become a compelling source of mystery, the way they did in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but no matter. It’s a relief to note what “Coyote vs. Acme” isn’t and a pleasure to celebrate what it is. It isn’t a flailing, content-regurgitating C.G.I. shit storm in the manner of “Space Jam: A New Legacy” (2021), one of the latest studio movies to attempt this kind of mashup, but, rather, a fleet, funny, often elegant throwback, made by artists with an obvious but not overweening reverence for the original “Looney Tunes” universe. (At one point, the filmmakers playfully sound a note of righteous contempt: Pepé Le Pew gets about a second of screen time, just so he can be cancelled as an odious sex pest.) The film has a gorgeous, crisply delineated surface; the hand-drawn lines of the animations both pop out from and mesh seamlessly with their live-action environments. The toon characters mine the intersection of those modes for inspired bursts of comic mayhem, whether in the various signs that Wile E. holds up to communicate or in the recurring spectacle of falling cartoon projectiles crashing into actual, physical property.