Coyote vs. Acme opens in the States this week sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I did not expect that. Shelved as a tax write-off, rescued after public outcry, then dragged through three years of headlines, a story that loud usually sets a film up to disappoint. Almost every film that has tried this has been kicked to death on arrival, and this one used most of the same tools.
I should say up front that I have not seen it. It does not reach us in Australia until 17 September, so this is not a review. What interests me is the reception, because the explanation everyone is reaching for falls apart the moment you look at how the film was made.
That explanation is the one under every trailer. CG bad, hand-drawn good. It cannot be right here, because Coyote vs. Acme is CG. DNEG handled the visual effects and animation on the Looney Tunes characters, rendered to read as though somebody drew them. Now hold that next to Tom & Jerry from 2021. Same idea, same studio lineage, and by most accounts a similar process, where 2D artists sketched key poses over a rough edit and the 3D animators worked to those drawings. The crew on Coyote called it sketchviz. Tom & Jerry got taken apart on arrival.
So the technology is not the variable. The technique is not the variable. Which leaves the uncomfortable answer, and it is the one I keep landing on in my own work. The difference is a series of decisions somebody made early, when they were expensive.
Here is the one that tells you everything. Director Dave Green had a life-size Wile E. Coyote puppet built and brought in Dave Barclay to perform it, a puppeteer whose own credits include Who Framed Roger Rabbit. They would shoot the first takes with the puppet in frame, then strike it and let Will Forte track his eyeline to where he remembered Wile E. being. Green could direct it live, telling Barclay to bark at Will on a take, so the character could surprise the actors. In Green’s words, Wile E. “was no longer an idea. He was actually a co-star.”
That is money and schedule spent right at the front of the pipeline, on the least glamorous problem in a hybrid film. Live actors usually spend these scenes staring at a tennis ball on a stick and hoping, and you can feel the absence of it in a lot of these movies. Everyone is performing at nothing, and it reads.
The second decision is a refusal. Wile E. does not speak. He is silent the whole way through, working in handwritten signs and pantomime, in a courtroom movie where the entire commercial logic is pushing you to let him talk. Somebody had to sit in a room and say no to the obvious note, repeatedly, for years.
The third is who got hired. Green went to Pete Browngardt and story artists for the chase material, back to the original Chuck Jones shorts. Duncan Studio came in for traditional animation, with certain characters handled entirely in 2D. He built a full-length story reel first, in his words “a watchable 90-minute movie, with voices and everything,” before the expensive work started. Not a VFX deliverable handed to a vendor. A cartoon, made by people who know what a cartoon is.
I have done a much cheaper version of the same thing. An animated series I worked on climaxed in a fight in a cluttered alley, and the story reel was beautiful, but the space it described did not match the digital set we actually had. So we spent a day with cardboard, glue and tape, built the alley as a physical model, and walked the director through the whole battle inside the real restrictions, every camera angle, every beat, before anyone opened the 3D environment. One day of cardboard, and we knew the sequence worked before it cost anything to find out.
This is the part worth saying plainly, because it gets lost every time one of these films lands badly. Vendors execute intent. They do not supply it. Framestore built the underwater world of The Little Mermaid and a large share of Snow White, and they are as good at putting CG into live action as anyone on earth. Paddington makes that hard to argue with. Both films still got panned. The craft was never the problem. You cannot execute your way out of a bad decision.
And I would rather we said that out loud, because the people at the bottom of that chain are the ones who wear it. MPC carried Disney’s remake era, more than 900 shots on Snow White alone, and in February last year its parent company collapsed. Administration in the UK, US operations shut. Nobody in the press blamed those artists for how the films turned out. But when it came down, they were the ones who lost their jobs over decisions that were never theirs.
So the thing I would take from Coyote vs. Acme, before I have even seen it, is that the taste is the craft. What separates the films that land is whether somebody in charge spent real money early, on the parts the audience will never see, and then held the line.
If you want to see how the gags stack up against Chuck Jones’ own rulebook, I have scored the trailer rule by rule over on my YouTube channel. And I will come back in September, once I have actually seen the film, to mark my own homework.