By Matt Wolfbridge
Note: This essay contains major spoilers for the film Coyote vs. Acme.
I planned on seeing Coyote vs Acme even if the reviews were bad. You see, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav had attempted to scuttle the film for a $30 million tax write off back in 2023. Public outcry stayed the executioner’s axe, and after a long sale period that saw Coyote vs. Acme's future in jeopardy, the movie landed in the hands of distributor Ketchup Entertainment. Rightly or wrongly, I viewed my ticket purchase as a middle finger to Zaslav and all the other CEOs more cartoonishly evil than any Looney Tunes villain.
Imagine my delight when the movie turned out to be multilayered, cleverly written, emotional, surprisingly political, and ultimately commentary on the very same destructive capitalist milieu that nearly stopped the film from it's release in the first place.
For those unfamiliar, Coyote vs. Acme is a feature film based on the classic Looney Tunes shorts from the 1950s and 60s. The original cartoon featured the star-crossed Wile E. Coyote concocting elaborate schemes to capture (and subsequently eat) a fast-as-lightning roadrunner simply called The Road Runner. Coyote's use of exclusively Acme products always backfires with comically brutal results. The movie takes this premise and injects it into the mold of a parody legal thriller. The most obvious cinematic comparison is 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, another live-animation film that sends-up the crime noir genre. There's also the too self-satisfied, vacantly mean-spirited, and ultimately forgettable Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers from 2022. I'll have to get to that one some other time.
You may not expect a film based on a cartoon coyote who runs face-first into tunnels painted on cliff-sides to have much of a plot but you'd be wrong. YouTube videos claiming to do "analysis" of media when in reality they just do recaps have given me an allergy to doing plot summaries. For that reason I actually don't want to talk about plot too much. But you need to understand the plot to understand why the movie is deep enough that I consider it The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in live-cartoon form.