I don't blame you if you're not aware there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters, especially given Warner Bros-Discovery's current leadership, but there's a new Looney Tunes movie currently out in theaters. It's technically published by Ketchup Entertainment in North America, not Warner Bros-Discovery, and it seems to have basically no marketing budget, so the only reason I know it exists is because of animation enthusiast websites like Cartoon Brew and Animation World Network (similar to how I found about Flow and Memoir of a Snail). It also doesn't help that, outside of Space Jam: A New Legacy and that soon-to-be-shuttered Multiversus video game, I'm not sure if younger generations even really recognize the likes of Porky Pig or Daffy Duck anymore.

It certainly doesn't help that the media tends to portray any and all cartoons as problematic and avoided at all costs, as if some World War II-era cartoon's poorly-aged jokes is that much more racist than what kids today are exposed to on right-wing social media and the current President + the elongated muskrat. I think the only reason we're not allowed to watch Pepe Le Pew cartoons anymore is because some old dude at the New York Times said so--not a feminist group or women in general, just some guy at some old corporate news conglomerate that now owns the rights to Wordle.

Anyway, my Dad (who of course grew up adoring these slapstick classics on TV) and I (who technically grew up with classic Looney Tunes too, via re-runs on Cartoon Network in the '90's) saw The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and it was pretty good. Now, as a movie that presumably started out as a made-for-streaming movie for Max that was unceremoniously cancelled as a tax write-off, then picked up by a virtually-unknown distributor with apparently ZERO marketing and advertising money (Ketchup Entertainment), and based on a classic cartoon franchise where the flimsy "story" was just an excuse for hilariously-violent cartoon shenanigans, you shouldn't go in expecting some life-changing theatrical masterpiece in the same league as Oscar-winning movies like Flow or Del Toro's Pinocchio.

However, as a "Looney Tunes" comedy, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a glorious return to form. For one thing, could you imagine an almost-purely 2D-animated film coming out in major theaters in 2025?? Seriously, outside of a couple of vehicles in the movie (which obviously are not supposed to squash and stretch like the characters do) the entire movie seems hand-drawn in a similar fashion to Bob Clampett and Tex Avery's shorts of old! Seeing all these people in 1940's-like suits and dresses wandering around with smartphones while licensed music from R.E.M. is playing in the background is weirdly charming.

It's also a great little parody of cheesy B-movies of the 1950s and '60s like Manos: Hands of Fate or Warner Bros' own Catalina Capers (if you've ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd know what I'm talking about). The evil villain plot is silly, the twists are contrived, and the acting is melodramatic, and I'm not just talking about the obvious cartoon characters of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Petunia Pig. Again, it's essentially just an excuse for cartoon characters to engage in some silly slapstick comedy and make ridiculous faces for 90 minutes straight, so as long as you're not expecting to hear about this movie at next year's Oscars Awards ceremony, you should enjoy it just fine.

That doesn't mean the writers didn't try at all to give Porky, Daffy and Petunia more interesting character arcs, though. There's a basic-but-moving message about brotherly love as the timid, stuttering Porky tries to get along with "looney" conspiracy theorist Daffy (this Daffy is based on the more popular "crazy" Daffy of the oldest cartoons, not the "greedy miser" Daffy in later cartoons), while Daffy tries to be a good wingman in Porky's attempts to woo Petunia. Petunia is one of the better-written female protagonists, in that she's a strong character that just so happens to be of the feminine persuasion, not some checkmark on a "diversity" checklist that no longer exists in Hollywood because of the Annoying Orange, and the fact that Hollywood never REALLY cared about social issues, they just cared about the money of people who do care about social issues. I think it helps that she is not depicted as a perfect "Mary Sue"--best emphasized when Porky first sees her--he certainly sees her as a beautiful, perfect, competent supermodel because he's in love, but then it snaps back to reality and Petunia is actually a messy dork who does weird things like taste-test dishwasher sponges in public (there's a method to her madness).

Overall, it's the 90-minute (mostly) 2D-animated slapstick Looney Tunes movie we've all been secretly hoping since we first saw one of the "good" Looney Tunes shorts growing up. It's always been a bit frustrating that these classic cartoon-to-movie adaptations have felt the need to give these inherently-basic characters contrived Pixar-like character arcs, as if a movie can't be carried by comedy and escapist entertainment alone. This is especially felt in the 1992 and 2021 Tom and Jerry movies. The 1992 one ("We've Got to Have...MONEY") is at least a bit of a guilty pleasure nowadays, though I remember hating it even as a wee babby and particularly finding the voice they gave Tom really grating, but the 2021 version is just "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids": the Motion Picture. I never want to see Tom FLOSS again. But this movie here is just unpretentious classic cartoon slapstick inspired particularly by Bob Clampett's wacky style, nothing more, nothing less. Probably helped it was originally just supposed to be some made-for-streaming movie (WB's straight-to-video/TV/streaming movies are sometimes better than they sound--ever watched Tom and Jerry Meet Johnny Quest?).

And hopefully now that we live in a world where Latvia's Flow proved a feature-length movie devoid of dialogue can work, Tom and Jerry will finally get the movie they deserve, too, Zaslav willing.

BONUS: Because this was technically published by the small Ketchup Entertainment, not Warner Bros, the previews before the movie were mostly for other extremely niche movies with almost no marketing budget. Unfortunately, none of them looked worth watching, and had me worried for a second that The Day the Earth Blew Up would be equally as bad and hokey-looking (it wasn't).

There was some surprisingly-unoriginal movie trailer from A24 (the boutique studio known for Marcell the Shell with Shoes On plus Hazbin Hotel) where some girl is tasked with hunting a mythical monster, but it turns out the mythical monster is really cute or something, so she protects it from those that want to kill it. So far, so E.T. I think they're trying to go for a Jim Henson puppet-like look with the monster, but the wannabe-Baby-Yoda freak of nature just looks like badly-composited CGi from the early 1990s. That must be why the movie also looks like it will only be 4:3 aspect ratio and somewhat blurry, like an old childhood VHS tape, either that or the simple fact that nearly every movie A24 publishes seems to have to make a pretentious, misguided stylistic choice that Disney and Dreamworks would never do (for good reason).

Probably the only other really notable animated movie coming out this month is Sneaks, about some designer shoes a kid wins, but then they get separated out in the city and one gets abducted by an evil shoe collector. So far, so Secret Life of Pets-meets-Toy Story 2. My Dad commented on one scene he felt was racial stereotyping, specifically where the protagonist shoe (a white shoe) is being a sissy out in the "Bronx" and a street-wise pair of shoes (black shoes) helps him out. Frankly the entire movie comes across as some weird modern-day equivalent to "Blaxxpoitation" movies, with both the kid that wins the shoes and the evil shoe collector being black, implying that only black boys and men care for designer shoes, and as a (half) white boy who still searches in vain to this day for the "SOAP" shoes Sonic wore in Sonic Adventure 2 (apparently they were a real brand that helped Sonic Team raise enough money to get the Dreamcast version of that game out, even when the Dreamcast itself was discontinued), I kind of take issue with that. The most offensive thing, though, is the janky 3D animation, made worse by Sneaks seemingly trying to imitate the "low framerate" look popularized by the Spider-verse movies, but ultimately ending up with what looks like a poorly-optimized Nintendo Switch port. Expect the likes of Saperspark to milk this mediocre-looking movie for YouTube content once it inevitably flops.

Sadly, these previews of lower-budget movies made the trailers for upcoming safe-but-polished Hollywood movies look more bearable in comparison. I'd be lying if the live-action Lilo and Stitch trailer didn't make me chuckle at least once, although I'm pretty sure that one joke already exists in the original that I could just re-watch now. Nani (or Nami, or whatever Lilo's adult sister's name was, though I'm fairly certain she's not Nami from One Piece), as usual, looks to be played by some skinny little actress with no GYATT like in the animated original, which I'm sure is going to piss off the "body positivity" crowd and those awakened by the original animated design (like me), but otherwise it's just yet another Disney remake nobody asked for but everybody is going to watch anyway.

Minecraft still looks like pure nightmare fuel that will scare small children (for comparison, when I was little, early PS1/N64 graphics and particularly Wallace and Gromit was all it took for my parents to get me a nightlight to deal with the nightmares). However, it looks like it will at least please its target audience of young Minecraft addicts, have the usual cheesy-but-somewhat-charming humor that, let's be honest, has been in kiddie movies since at least the 1980's, and even have a good (if basic) message about the virtues of creativity (the good guys encourage it, the bad guys denounce it). Maybe it will even become some sort of nostalgic guilty pleasure for today's children the same way I'm nostalgic for Pokemon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, while fully acknowledge it was a crap, glorified toy commercial for Pokemon merchandise. But seriously, what were they THINKING giving the villagers these weird, fleshy, overly-realistic skin textures, while also making the Creepers unintentionally adorable?

If you somehow read ALL of this...I love you. ^3^<3