Today is going to be a review of the new Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up. But buckle up folks, because really this is going to be the way I pry the door open for a much longer and existential piece next week. (Which really I wanted to be putting out today, but I had a busy week and didn’t get home until 4am last night, so it was not going to happen).

Background

It’s a near miracle that this movie came out. The fact that I’m saying this about a LOONEY TUNES movie in the year 2025 is something so patently ridiculous that I’ll probably spend over 5,000 words on the subject next week, but that’s just the reality we’re living in right now.

The Day the Earth Blew Up is actually the first fully animated Looney Tunes feature ever put out, something that I was shocked to learn. All the other full-length movies that have come out from the franchise have been hybrid animated/live-action in the style of Space Jam. So it’s interesting to me that this is the movie that Warner Bros Animation decided to put out to sell audiences on a full 90-minute Looney Tunes experience. Given the way that the movie is now being treated, frankly I don’t know if we’ll see something like this from the studio again.

This movie began production in 2019, crucially before the Warner Bros. Discovery merger of 2022. Like many other projects that began before the merger, it initially seemed like this movie was going to end up in a scrap pile. Thankfully, the producer of the movie Pete Browngardt was able to convince the higher ups at the network to allow the movie to be shown at the Annecy Film Festival, essentially the Sundance of the animated world. There, the movie was able to shop itself around and eventually be picked up by independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment. Please keep in mind how absurd it is that a Looney Tunes movie is being distributed by an independent company.

Plot

The Day the Earth Blew Up is a buddy comedy movie centered on Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. In this movie, the two have been raised as basically brothers since infancy. As one might expect, Porky is the neurotic straight man while Daffy is the loose cannon. After growing up under the watchful eye and protective roof of their father, Farmer Jim, the two are eventually left his farmhouse. However, they are woefully unprepared for adulthood, and the start of the movie sees them having to quickly find a job.

But that’s also not really important, because the movie quickly transitions from being a somewhat quirky coming-of-age story to an alien invasion movie. To be frank, the plot in this movie is pretty secondary. It exists as a convenient device to shake up the art or animation style, and even more importantly to get the audience from gag to gag. But nevertheless, shortly after Daffy and Porky finally get a job that they can competently perform at the local gum factory, Daffy learns that the gum has been compromised to act as an alien mind control device. The only problem is, Daffy is the worst person to share this sort of crucial information with society.

The two brothers are forced to combat the alien invasion with the help of friend/love interest Petunia Pig as the problem gets increasingly out of hand. The audience sees the trio fight against alien gum monsters, evade the mind-controlled drones, and try to find some way to avert the crisis before the alien mastermind is able to complete his mysterious, nefarious goal. But once again, the plot is present only as much as needed to act as a vehicle for the jokes and the art.

Review

I’ll be honest, this is a movie that I want to love more than I do. I think this movie has some really solid gags, but even more importantly, this movie was clearly made by people who care deeply and intensely about the craft of animation and cartooning. While I am and have always been a fan of cartoons, my knowledge on the subject is pretty superficial. But even I was able to see that the movie was making some pretty pointed callbacks to the works of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and probably most importantly Chuck Jones. Despite the fact that Marvin the Martian does not show up in this movie (albeit to my great surprise), it’s clear that Chuck Jones directed space sequences in short films like Duck Dodgers or Hare-way to the Stars had a massive influence on this movie. The incorporation of things like space suits or the space as a vacuum is all well and good when it serves the gag, but it is the mix of both nodding to and ignoring physics that allows the gags to remain surprising.

What I desperately wanted from this movie though was for the jokes and the writing to be interconnected in that same way. Instead, the movie was focused on throwing as many jokes and gags at the audience as possible instead of making sure that they work together as a cohesive whole. This is tonally inconsistent with how the Looney Tunes have typically operated, but I think it’s harder to make this style work in a 90 minute feature compared to a short, or even a shorts compilation. Additionally, when the focus feels to be more on the quantity rather than quality of jokes, there are going to be a fair number of jokes that just don’t feel up to snuff. Partially, this may be on me. While I’d like to say that I’m not necessarily a joke snob, I’m also the type of person who will call certain types of jokes sophomoric, so take from that what you will. This meant that there were a good number of jokes that made me roll my eyes rather than laugh.

Despite everything I’ve said about the writing, I don’t have enough positive things to say about the art. I hope I’ve helped make it somewhat clear through my copious use of pictures throughout this piece, this movie looks great. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a 2D movie that looks this good, and the art and animation teams were allowed to play with different styles and to make homages to the classics. They play all the hits. There are moments of 50s art deco style, 40s neo-industrialism, 20s Americana and more that I couldn’t even pick out. There are references to sci-fi classics like The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and They Live. There is so much joy and respect for the craft in the art that I was left desperately wishing that the writing and direction were able to keep pace.

The voice acting is solid. There’s no replacing Mel Blanc, but Eric Bauza manages to play both Daffy and Porky well enough that it was surprising to hear that he voiced both. Both the classic lisp and stutter were in full effect, although I could have used more of a lisp for Daffy. I have to imagine that I’m in the minority on that one. Switching voice actors over time is never easy, but Bauza manages to capture the energy and the spirit of both characters, while having them react appropriately to the plot. I wish the dialogue he was given was a bit stronger, but that’s beyond his control. None of the other voice acting particularly stood out, but it was nice to hear Wayne Knight back in a Looney Tunes movie.

Overall, I think that this is a movie that is important to see from a symbolic perspective. I’ll get into more of what I mean by that in the next half of this review, but I think that this movie is deeply tapped into the craft of cartooning. And I think that’s an extremely important thing to support right now. It would be easy to take a conservative lens on this and to talk about how important it is that this movie is reverential of history and how iconic the characters are, but that’s not what I’m trying to do here. This movie is not just important because it respects the past, but also because of how it’s trying to move the medium forward. 2D animation has been woefully neglected because it’s incredibly hard to hand draw and animate movies! The fact that this movie takes as many wild, artistic swings as it does is something I have so much respect for, even if I didn’t always enjoy said swings.

At the end of the day, I rated this movie 3.5⭐ which is more accurately giving the story a 3 and the art a 5. But I hope that you can take away from this review that this rating is such a superficial way of understanding my feelings about this movie. There is so much here that is special and worth talking about, and I would sincerely encourage all of you to go and see this movie if you can. Because who knows how much longer we’ll be able to see movies like this.

That’s all for this week. Now that I’ve gotten my ground level feelings on the movie out of the way, prepare for next week where I plan to tie in how I feel this movie relates to our larger cultural moment. I’m polishing my soapbox now. As always, I appreciate everyone who’s given me feedback on the pieces thus far, and feel free to make recommendations on anything you’d like me to cover. Consider liking the paired post on instagram, and grab a friend to go see this movie. I’ll see you all next week.