Dave Green’s “Coyote vs. Acme” is a movie that you were never meant to see. Seriously. An absolutely delightful, fully engaging, and deeply moving tribute to the power of perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds, self-inflicted and corporately manipulated; the film is a joy, brimming with classic Looney Tunes ingenuity, slapstick humor, and biting satire. It’s the best movie to ever primarily focus on the Looney Tunes; its only peer being the Robert Zemeckis classic “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, and it plays like gangbusters for children and adults alike, as evidenced by my theater’s rollicking reactions to each of Wile E. Coyote’s attempts to sidestep his misfortunes in his laser-focused pursuit of the Roadrunner. Love spills out from every frame; the emotions are earned and earnest, and the lessons it imparts are evergreen; a triumph of blending animation styles and tones that manifest the manic energy of the classic shorts and casts them across the canvas of a not-so-far-fetched reality. So, one wonders why Warner Bros, the film’s original financier, decided to shelve the picture; taking it as a tax write-off and intending to functionally delete “Coyote vs. Acme” from existence without audiences ever being able to see it. The short answer: greed and a bass akward perception of what audiences want to see on movie screens, the least loony reason imaginable. Still, that’s a little too simple, too mundane, and doesn’t give “Coyote vs. Acme” the credit it deserves for retaining its outsider status and dropping dynamite in the pants of its corporate overlords. Because “Coyote vs. Acme” isn’t just a romp with Looney Tunes, it’s an anti-corporate screed with Rube Goldberg contraptions, a call for kindness and the valuing of persistence to a dream which may never be attainable but is all the more sterling for its impossibility. I never imagined that I might cry at the emotional complexity of one Mr. Wile E. Coyote; but that’s only because I never fully considered him as a living, breathing representation of blind, shimmering hope. When laid out before us, like a lovingly pencilled hair-brained schematic, the Coyote’s plight becomes all the more relatable: an everyman who knows that failure is a perspective and getting up after falling off a cliff for the thousandth time may be madness, but is also innately human, fundamentally artistic, and well worth aspiring to. No wonder Warner Bros. wanted to bury this movie. It goes against everything they stand for.
“Coyote vs. Acme” is exactly what it sounds like: a court case that pits the ever-hungry carnivore against the mega-corporation whose products have been failing him for years. After a lifetime of exploding rocket skates, flying costumes that lose their wings, and parachutes that hold only silverware, we see Wile E. Coyote (Carnivorous Vulgaris) sit down in his lonely cave, piled high with ACME-produced duds. As he begins doodling his next attempt to capture the Roadrunner (Acceleratti Incredibilus), he sees an ad on TV from an ambulance-chasing style lawyer, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who asks if anyone watching has ever been harmed by ACME’s faulty creations. If so, they could be entitled to financial compensation. You see, ACME, far from the gag gift manufacturer we perceived it as, is in fact a multi-national conglomerate that makes everything from garden sprinklers to jet-propelled missiles. Their CEO, Foghorn Leghorn, runs a crack legal strategy of pacification, paying off the petty grievances of cartoons harmed by their products as a means to the end of global economic domination, with his lawyer (John Cena) as his first line of defense. Sensing an opportunity, Wile E. ventures into Albuquerque to find Avery and seek out the lawsuit that he justifiably deserves. Unfortunately, Avery is a layabout, a hack, a downtrodden attorney without any sense of justice who is looking for quick paydays for his myriad cartoon clients who come in with fallen-anvil injuries and stars chirping around their heads. But Wile E. isn’t here for a payday; he has bigger fish to fry, and his willfulness, even in the face of unrelenting and painful opposition, pushes Avery not only into a conspiracy that goes right to the top of ACME but also to rediscover that the attempt to do good, even if failure is assured, is always worth the effort.
So far as Looney Tunes movies go, “Coyote vs. Acme” is unique in the fact that the cartoons in question are not movie stars or known quantities in the world at large. Wile E. and the Roadrunner simply exist, playing out their high-speed cat-and-mouse game amid the desolation of Monument Valley without anyone around to witness their antics. If an anvil falls on a Coyote in the desert and nobody sees it, did it even happen? It is to the film’s credit that it chooses to not front load the A-Team of Looney Tunes characters, leaving Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny as fun cameos that only further the story of Wile E. This decision, while comedically fruitful, proves an interesting conundrum for the filmmakers, considering the fact that the Coyote does not talk and can only communicate through a limited number of exclamatory signs, which is in keeping with the history and discipline of the character. There is a list of nine rules that the prolific Looney Tunes director and animator Chuck Jones put together for the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons, which include: the Road-Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep-beep, no outside force can harm the Coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products; and no dialogue ever, except “beep-beep! By embracing these considerations, much like the legendary animators who first brought the Coyote and Roadrunner to life, the filmmakers not only create a hilarious film but also one that is true to the characters themselves. However, it is with two other rules that the film’s soul and guiding light can be most ascertained: the Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road-Runner and the audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote. That front-loading of empathy for the wayward Coyote, of his incessant and fanatical dedication to catching the Roadrunner, is parlayed in the film for maximum philosophical resonance. Who knew that the Coyote was a role model; deluded perhaps, but an aspirational figure all the same? I’ll never watch him accidentally get cracked on the head by a falling boulder again without feeling a profound sense of kinship with the guy. Sure, I don’t want him to kill and eat the Roadrunner; I love him too, but as the film reaches its crescendo, it’s easy to see that the pursuit itself is far more important than the feast to follow for both predator and prey, as one could nary exist without the other. It’s Sisyphean in the most relatable way, a connection the film makes overt, and connects these silly little cartoons with the pantheons of myth itself. That’s a high-wire act that an ACME can’t foul up, which makes “Coyote vs. Acme” much more than a fun family film; it’s a miracle movie and laugh riot to boot.
“Coyote vs. Acme” shouldn’t exist, but its release and brilliance are a light in an increasingly dim world; one that may very well prove to be a freight train barreling down on us all but is still a useful means of illumination all the same. As the scourge of AI slop and corporate malfeasance means to eliminate not only all human artistry from the world but also the very pieces of art themselves, it’s the little victories that make the road worth running no matter the pitfalls or dynamite traps in our path. It doesn’t mean the fight is over; there are ACME’s everywhere ready to drop a collective anvil on everything we hold dear, and that fact can be disheartening at times. But thankfully I know a guy worth emulating who never gives up, who gets knocked down, bludgeoned, shattered, but still gets up and goes back to the drawing board to try again. If he can do it, maybe so can we.
Beep ACME.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Coyote vs. ACME” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
