As Jason already mentioned in part 1, a new Looney Tunes movie has recently been announced. Now, understandably, people are more reluctant than enthusiastic about this news, especially in the wake of Looney Tunes: Back in Action. But I personally didn’t think that LT: BiA was all that terrible a film. Not a great movie, but not the abomination that so many thought it was. I liked Back in Action; the problem is I didn’t love it. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I’d like to love a Looney Tunes project again.
It’s wishful thinking, but I’d like for this movie to do for the Looney Tunes what Joss Whedon’s The Avengers did for superhero movies. The Avengers was awesome. It was well-done, impeccably handled from Iron Man all the way up to the big team-up film at the end, the cast and crew worked their collective asses off to make that film work, and it paid off. That’s what I’d like to see happen in the next Looney Tunes project. I’m not saying that this Jenny Slate is the one who can deliver the goods, but hopefully there will be enough people behind the scenes who actually care about the characters and aren’t just interested in making a quick buck.
Here’s all that’s known about it right now:
- The film is being written by Jenny Slate, a former Saturday Night Live cast member and co-writer of the web short Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.
- The film will be a CGI/live-action hybrid.
For the life of me, I’ll never understand all of this hate for CGI. I understand if one just prefers hand-drawn animation over CGI, but wanting a new project to fail just because it’s CG? That I don’t understand at all.
It’s sad how some folks allow themselves to get so butt-hurt over the prominence of CG animated movies that quality doesn’t matter to them. You should want the movie to be good. Simply being traditional hand drawn animation doesn’t instantly make the movie good and just being CG animated doesn’t instantly make the movie bad. Refusing to watch a movie or hoping it bombs just because of how it’s made is a really closed-minded thing to do. It’s one thing to be disappointed by the lack of traditional animated movies and another thing to refuse to watch or hope for the failure of potentially good movies because they’re not made the way you want them to be. Wishing for a movie to crash and burn will not bring traditional animation back.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more traditional hand-drawn animated movies myself but films like Meet the Robinsons, Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph were still good movies. They showed that the type of animation doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it. CGI doesn’t automatically mean something’s bad and animated movies shouldn’t be shunned or ignored for that reason alone. This mindset annoys me to no end. Quality is what matters, not how something is made. Quality.
Take a look at these 3 recent short clips and tell me how “awful” and “expressionless” CGI is:
There. Were those really so bad? If WB made a movie or a TV show like these shorts, I’d watch the heck out of it.
The other (well, one of the other) major complaints I’ve read regarding this movie is the fact that it’s part live-action; in fact, some have questioned why a Looney Tunes movie needs any live-action elements at all? Surely, we could get a Looney Tunes movie with just the Looney Tunes alone, all animated?
Regarding that, it’s likely that present day Hollywood doesn’t think that the Looney Tunes are capable of carrying an entire movie on their own (especially given their less-than-impressive track record with features as of late), unless said movie were just going to be a compilation of old shorts with original linking material, and there’s no need for another one of those with the majority of the shorts being available for viewing in other other outlets, nor would I personally want see another film like that, as that formula’s been done to death. If Warner Brothers wants to keep the Looney Tunes relevant, they can’t just keep recycling their old material, they have to periodically update themselves and present us with something new which we haven’t seen a hundred times already.
The current mode of thinking in Hollywood is that most established older cartoons need to appear alongside big-name live actors in order to get more people into the box office. Familiarity and big-name stars have always been an easy way to increase box office numbers; folks are generally more inclined to go see a new movie if so-and-so from such-and-such is in it. But if this movie is intended to feature all or most of the core Looney Tunes characters as a group, then this technique can prove to be problematic, as the original shorts directors very seldom, if ever, used the characters all together for a singular story, especially not a feature-length story, save for those aforementioned compilation hodgepodge movies and TV specials, which again consisted of re-airings of the shorts with new linking material. Toss in live actors on top of that and some storyline involving how and why the cartoons and the live humans are together and having to create some sort of conflict for the characters to resolve and you’ve got a huge writing task on your hands, especially considering that you’re working with a set of characters who were never designed to carry out a feature-length plot in the first place.
This is why I think new LT shorts are a better idea than a new feature. Short subjects are what the LT characters were created for, and that’s where they shine. I really don’t think there’s some magic formula that Hollywood has yet to hit on to make a Looney Tunes feature film work; I don’t think the Looney Tunes are suited for feature films at all. A Looney Tunes movie has always been a bad idea and it always will be a bad idea. I could be proven wrong about that (and believe me, I’d like to be), but I’m not betting danger money on it.
Twin Images 