Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up review – still capers after all these years

The Looney Tunes franchise has been regularly resuscitated and rebooted for new generations ever since Warner Bros stopped making the original cartoons back in the 1960s, creating more minutes of screen time than all the Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Jurassic Park remakes and spin-offs combined. Like some fiendish glue from the Acme corporation, the Looney Tunes IP is sticky, resilient stuff: instantly recognisable, easily dubbed into other languages, with codes and quirks peculiarly pleasing to audiences of all ages, and yet easily malleable to fit the comic modes and manners of each age.

This feature, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza), feels very 2020s – in that it’s not embarrassed about getting sappy from the off and then resolving its core dramatic problems with a big dose of child psychologist-friendly empowerment lessons about accepting people for who they are and the value of loyalty. Bizarrely for anyone raised on Saturday-morning repeats of the original 1930s-50s toons where the two were usually adversaries, Daffy and Porky are best friends forever here, raised together like brothers by their adoptive parent, Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), who then promptly carks it in the first 10 minutes after enjoining them to always stick together.

This they do – literally by the time the third act rolls round, given that the story depends on a new flavour of chewing gum that becomes a vehicle for alien mind control for reasons too otiose to explain here. Meanwhile, this iteration of Loon-acy lore has promoted Porky’s sometime ladyfriend Petunia (Candi Milo), a very marginal figure in the original shorts, to third wheel of the tricycle, key to the plot’s machinations because she’s a food scientist obsessed with inventing new flavours. At least feminism has achieved this much.

There are a couple of nostalgic callbacks to the glory days of creator/director Chuck Jones’s work on the originals, with reference to his 1953 masterpiece Duck Amuck, although sadly there’s none of the dizzying wit and meta playfulness of that work on display in this mostly pedestrian script. The character designs, especially for Daffy, take inspiration more from his very earliest incarnations when he was a very energetic wiry duck, prone to hyperactive explosions of destruction and anarchy, rather than the rage-filled, frustrated creature he later became.

Elsewhere, the different design styles within this universe sprinkles unexpected textures and surfaces about, making this feel a bit more like Ren and Stimpy than old-school (or even middle school) Daffy and Porks. It never provokes full-on out loud laughs, but there are wry chuckles to be had and the ferocity of the execution is pretty fun.