For those that came in late: Coyote vs. Acme is a live-action/animation hybrid comedy, based around the popular Looney Tunes cartoon shorts featuring the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. The film is written by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater, and Samy Burch, and inspired by a satirical New Yorker article by Ian Frazier. It is directed by Dave Green, produced by Warner Bros, and was shot back in 2022.

In 2023 Warner Bros corporate made the decision to shelve the completed film rather than distribute it, allowing the company to claim a tax loss of USD$30 million. Following an industry outcry, Warner Bros – while not releasing the film themselves – made it available for competitor studios and distributors to purchase. Ultimately Ketchup Entertainment was successful in securing Coyote vs. Acme for an estimated USD$50m, and it has finally come to cinemas around the world some three years after it was completed.

In the film Wile E. Coyote, exhausted from decades of trying to capture the Road Runner, files a lawsuit against the powerful Acme corporation, alleging that it is their faulty gadgets and equipment that have resulted in his ongoing failure. With the help of billboard lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) and his niece Paige (Lana Condor), Wile E. faces up against superstar lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena) and the full might of his corporate team.

It is impossible to watch this film without marvelling at how strangely its narrative echoes its own production. A film about a plucky individual challenging an enormous and powerful corporation is itself cast aside by another enormous and powerful corporation, and it becomes hard not to wish the film every success simply for the effect it will have on the Warner Bros executive to bury it in the first place. It is a situation that gives some of the jokes a bite that they otherwise would not have had.

Thankfully, even on its own merits Coyote vs Acme is an impressive piece of work. The love Green and his crew have for the original Looney Tunes animated shorts is palpable, and infection. Long-term fans of the theatrical series will have a field day spotting all of the cameos, references, and in-jokes that have been enthusiastically packed into the film. At the same time, the broad slapstick humour around which those older shorts centred is effectively revived and laid on with gusto. The human cast – led by Forte and Cena – successfully balances the need to raise the artificiality of their performances with a simultaneous need to take a step back from matching the energy of the animated protagonists. They support without competing, and it gives a strength to the film’s humour that was not as evident in early Looney Tunes-live-action hybrids like Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003).

Of course all hybrid comedies of this nature live under the shadow of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While this new work is no threat to that film’s status, it is still a tremendously funny success. Any shortfalls in the animation – which has an unavoidable stiffness from using CGI in place of hand-drawn art – feel fully compensated by the sharpness of the humour.

I expected some funny gags and clever cameos. I anticipated the strong sense of nostalgia, where the appeal of the piece comes as much from the original shorts as the film itself. What I did not expect was the perfectly-pitched, sensitively played central thesis on why the Coyote does what he does, reframing the myth of Sisyphus into something joyful and beautiful? I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes.