So I went to see Coyote vs. Acme yesterday! This movie has intrigued the everloving fuck out of me since the initial hullabaloo about Warner being completely evil and shelving the thing, openly, for tax purposes, so knowing that it got picked up for distribution (and has since gone on to print money—take that, corpo stooges!) had me making plans to go see it.

I wasn't expecting to find it so enjoyable though, on literally every level, nor was I expecting it to be so surprisingly cerebral. I wonder if, the way the 80s were marked by the juxtaposition of rampant consumerism and nuclear paranoia and the 90s were all earthy, angsty, yet with an eye and heart towards a better world, the 2020s aren't going to be remembered for media that perfectly encapsulates the complete death of trust in every single institution in society. Coyote vs. Acme does that with a smile and makes you want to soldier on anyway.

So, fuck it. I'm wide awake late at night. Let's talk about a coyote. Given that one of the group's favorite streamers, a former vaguely successful cartoon reviewer, has given the WASP "no" to making money and reviewing it (God, what I'd give to see that fucking idiot bumblefuck his way through a review of it), I'm happy to instead. I am also capable of showering, unlike him.

I'm going to avoid spoilers here, but this movie is just so kino with the details that it's hard raving about it without them. I will assume you know the premise: Wile E. Coyote, ego as sore as his body from his latest failure in catching the Road Runner, hatches a plan to sue Acme for selling him defective gear. His lawyer is a low-rent ambulance chaser who settles every case for pitiful sums of money. Acme's lawyer is John Cena, who is perfect for the role in the fact that he always seemed evil to me anyway.

This movie is paced perfectly. I actually had zero idea where it would take its premise (and for once I didn't soothe my anxiety and look it up), and I'm pleased to report that it does not go where you think it does. Nothing about it feels forced. There's no industry rag twenty point list of beats it follows. It has the extra unenviable job of trying to make a happy ending out of what is explicitly repeated failure. The Coyote can never catch the Road Runner. How do you make a movie about endless failure satisfying? It did. Again, without spoiling it, the solution to who won was instead a third option, and really, the correct option for a movie about fighting the system.

That's another impressive thing to me: how unusually sharp the satire is for a movie practically made by its villains. Acme is not merely a company in this universe; they made your phone, they own the media, they cover shit up. This is Warner-Discovery, the ghoulish conglomerate who shitcanned it to begin with. Warner threatened not just the audience, but everyone who put many hours into working on this movie, with its literal removal from existence, saying that nobody would ever want to see this fucking thing, and it's currently sucking all the air out of the room.

Coyote vs. Acme is the retelling of its own creation and struggle to survive. (And the aftermath of that struggle is along the lines of how the movie itself also wraps up, another reason the satire is so pitch perfect. Again, hard to explain without spoilers.)

I risk making it sound too heady, but this thing goes by quick and it is a feast trying to catch all the details. This movie isn't just sharp in the writing (and the jokes really do aim for all across the body, from subtle swipes to grand satire to some I literally only got reading people commiserating on Reddit about it), but it's visually such a treat as well. The toons look great, true to their 2D origins despite largely being models, they have such a classic visual language to their expressions and bounciness and ability to destroy everything around them, and they're integrated fantastically into the real world. The sight gags are really inventive, and there was only a single moment where I felt like it was obvious they weren't really in with the human actors. Impressively, that wasn't either of the times where the pratfall slapstick involves the human actors and not just the toons.

Spoiler, it was this. If you haven't seen it, visually, this is probably the weakest bit, so it's all uphill from there.

This movie really just has it all: the head, the heart, the look, the wit, the greater Looney Tunes callbacks and ensemble cast (some of these guys. I didn't even recognize!), the way it humanizes Wile E. Coyote as a victim as much as a reckless predator, the grander social statement it makes with the way the toons exist in their society, that fucking awesome Run the Jewels bit that was censored with Road Runner sounds and somehow still sounded baller as fuck for it. Even the credits sequence looked cool.

To shamelessly steal from a Redditor what sums up my thoughts as well: this movie is up there with the Paddington movies for children's fare that has no right being as good as it is. I cannot recommend it enough. We somehow are in a really good time for animated films right now—and I say that having sat through a shitass trailer for an Illumination-tier Cat in the Hat movie about time travel set to "Stressed Out" (it even turned the Things into Minions, ick). I felt the same about The Bad Guys 2 being preceded by trailers for downright garbo looking movies. It's pretty clear that, even with Hollywood's state being this absolute, the creatives have it fucking going on right now, and we need to let them run loose more.

I so would love to see an era where talented creative people get tidy little budgets from the conglomerates to deconstruct and experiment with the media and characters that are the fabric of our culture. Until that happens (which will be never), I'll simply say go see Coyote vs. Acme. The people responsible for this thing almost being vaulted forever will never get why we're laughing at them, but laugh we can anyway.

Tagged under: movies