‘You’ll Never Catch Him!’ | Lucas Adams

Paul Julian just wanted everyone to get out of the way. Maneuvering down the narrow hallways on the Warner Brothers studio lot while carrying a very long, freshly painted background, the artist (who had worked as a WPA muralist before his animation gig) would emit a car horn–esque “beep-beep” to warn his colleagues of his approach. The Looney Tunes impresario Chuck Jones heard Julian and convinced him to come to the Warner recording studio, where his urgent beeps (Julian always insisted that the spelling ought to be “hmeep-hmeep”) were put on tape. These recordings, sped up, debuted in 1949’s Fast and Furry-ous, the very first Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon, and have been employed as the Road Runner’s vocalization ever since. 

The ad hoc recording of a now inescapable sound (you’re hearing it in your head right now, aren’t you?) was not remarkable in the moment. Michael Maltese, the writer of Fast and Furry-ous, said in an interview long after its release, “It was just another one-shot, just another workaday cartoon.” Now, though, in the words of the animation historian Michael Barrier, the Coyote and Road Runner shorts “could be considered the Warner cartoons at their purest.” In his 1989 autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Jones outlined a list of strict commandments he claimed governed the creation of each Coyote and Road Runner cartoon. They included such wisdom as “No outside force can harm the coyote, only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.” Maltese threw water on this, in an interview with Barrier in 1971: “If we had laws or anything, I never heard of them.”

The simplicity and strictness of the original shorts, though, is undeniable: a consistent (albeit sometimes abstract) Southwestern setting, no dialogue beyond Julian’s hurried beeps, and no additional characters beyond Coyote and Road Runner. As David Mamet put it in On Directing Film: “If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free. That’s true creativity.” In Fast and Furry-ous, this freedom allows for twelve distinct attempts on the life of the Road Runner in seven minutes; the coyote, among other methods, chases him with a knife and fork, attempts to blow him up with a rocket, dresses up as a schoolgirl and sets up a fake school crossing sign in order to grab him, and attacks him with an ax. These efforts each fail when, in order, Road Runner outraces Coyote, the rocket launches Coyote into a cliff, Road Runner blows through the school crossing holding a sign that reads ROAD RUNNERS CAN’T READ, and Coyote, ax in hand, is mowed down by a bus.

That same tension and creativity animate Coyote vs. Acme, which arises Lazarus-like into movie theaters this month after being condemned to oblivion by Warner CEO and denim enthusiast David Zaslav. In November 2023 Zaslav attempted to shelve the movie (which he apparently never saw) in order to earn a reported $30 million tax write-off, or some such abstruse financial calculation. Outrage was swift online, among both fans and film professionals. As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “Looney Tunes had been foundational to Warner Bros. for more than 80 years; it was as if Disney had killed off Mickey.” Warner, in part shamed by the outcry, sold the full distribution rights to Ketchup Entertainment for $50 million in 2025.

Coyote vs. Acme is a Looney Tunes cartoon and a legal drama, built off of a 1990 New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece by Ian Frazier that outlines a lawsuit filed by “Wile E. Coyote, Plaintiff” against the Acme Company for “compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company.” Will Forte joins the unlikely pantheon of actors who have starred alongside the Looney Tunes in a feature film, which includes Bob Hoskins, Michael Jordan, Brendan Fraser, and LeBron James. He plays Paul Avery, a Harvard law graduate turned deadbeat lawyer. Avery has settled into a life filing two-bit lawsuits on behalf of cartoon characters who have been harmed by Acme-made products, usually winning minuscule, perfunctory payouts. He avoids the risk of defeat at all costs. As he puts it to Paige (played by Lana Condor), his niece and an intern at his law firm, “It is really super easy to lose.”

Only when Coyote arrives at Avery’s office brandishing a battered business card— 

WILE E. COYOTE
GENIUS 
HAVE BRAIN     WILL TRAVEL 

—and seemingly intent on suing Acme for millions over every defective product he’s ever used, does Avery’s cautious world begin to come apart. 

Avery balks at pursuing such a monumental case, urging Coyote to file a “run-of-the-mill three-hundred-dollar rocket-skate case” instead, which would, after all, make him “the richest coyote in the country.” But Coyote—who, freed of the constraints of Acme products and his obsessive pursuit of the impossible, reveals himself to be a remarkably clever and resourceful schemer—tricks him into suing Acme over the failed rocket skates as well as the entire list of defective items he has ever used in his efforts to kill the Road Runner: a box of “tornado pills” that ended up engulfing him; a spring-loaded catapult that launched him straight into the ground; an enormous bear trap that, naturally, closed on him; and a Burmese tiger trap that caught a Burmese tiger instead of the Road Runner, to name a few. Soon Avery and Coyote are meeting with the Acme legal team, headed by Buddy Crane, Avery’s nemesis from law school, played by a wonderfully smug John Cena. Crane commands Avery to back down—“Time for you to do what you do best: settle”—but is foiled by the Coyote, who, in another surprising victory, sets the settlement ablaze. Crane, covered in ashes, splutters, “Cartoons are supposed to be FUNNY!” 

What kind of funny does Coyote vs. Acme pursue? The film faces the weary dilemma characteristic of our age of endless reboots and revivals: How do you treat the material of a cherished, nearly century-old piece of “intellectual property”? Cautiously and reverentially? Irreverently? With a shot-for-shot remake? An overly gritty reboot? The approach Coyote vs. Acme takes seems to have been informed, both in what to emulate and what to avoid, by two of the most famous Looney Tunes hybrid live action–animation movies: 1988’s Chinatown-but-a-cartoon Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and 1996’s Michael Jordan hagiography Space Jam.

Space Jam was a pivot by Warner Brothers toward a Disneyesque style of family-friendly animation that also happened to be an opportunity to team up with one of the major athletic and commercial forces of the 1990s. As Wayne Knight (playing a publicist but best known for his roles as Newman in Seinfeld and Dennis Nedry, the guy who gets sprayed in the face by a Dilophosaur in Jurassic Park) reminds Jordan and viewers in one scene: “Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and your Gatorade, and we’ll pick up a Big Mac on the way to the ballpark!” 

Framed as a secret history of Jordan’s retirement from and return to basketball—Michael Jordan, playing Michael Jordan, is tasked with leading a team of Looney Tunes to victory in a basketball game against some aliens—Space Jam was a 1990s commercial juggernaut. Not only did it make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, the soundtrack album went platinum six times and the ancillary Happy Meals, shoes, T-shirts, toys, an eventual sequel (2021’s wretched Space Jam: A New Legacy), and etc. ad nauseam eventually made billions of dollars. But despite its considerable success, Space Jam had notable critics. Chuck Jones, aged eighty-four, was escorted off the Warner studio lot after bitterly criticizing the film in a speech to its animators. In Jones’s estimation, Space Jam reduced the Looney Tunes to props, stripping them of their fundamental personalities.

If Space Jam kept its sights set on the commercial world, the decidedly darker Who Framed Roger Rabbit? put the character of its cartoons at the center of the story. A 1940s-set neo-noir whodunit about a world in which cartoon characters (“toons”) live in a ghetto of Los Angeles called Toontown, Roger Rabbit builds from the murder of the CEO of Acme to a sinister villain’s threat to wipe out Toontown and all of its residents. (The director, Robert Zemeckis, understood this to be, essentially, a reference to a fascist genocide, although he said that he drew the line at calling it “the final solution.”) Yet Roger Rabbit is also a terrific comedy, using the seriousness of its stakes and certain rules about the physical reality of bridging two- and three-dimensional space—the attack is to be carried out with a concoction called “the Dip” that literally erases toons—to build inspired gags. When one of the villain’s weasel henchmen is thrown into a vat of the Dip, we soon see his angelic form, strumming a harp and winging his way up to heaven. In the end, the bad guys are foiled (or erased) and the toons are given sovereignty over their enclave.

Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but asks: What if the bad guys had already won? Rather than a 1980s spin on postwar noir, the director, Dave Green, brings the Looney Tunes into the grind of contemporary capitalism, presenting a world of corporate brutality and extreme workplace violations. This would seem, in a sidelong way, to indict the enthusiastic commercialism of Space Jam; the brief moments of product placement in Coyote vs. Acme—we see a sign for the middling sandwich chain Jimmy Johns, a bag of Utz Chips, and a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in Forte’s office—feel somewhat incongruous, though their rarity suggests that the Looney Tunes are not the tie-in behemoth they were in the 1990s.

Instead, it seems that with less corporate financial interest and oversight—and without one of the richest people in the world on the call sheet—Green had more freedom to get weird. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he recalled asking a crucial creative question: “If Wile E. were to sue Acme, would he have a good case?” He took the question seriously, as the film’s screenwriter Samy Burch observed: “He was taking this joke to a point where there’s a certain amount of filmic rigor with it.” Thus we get a comic universe in which the shelves at a law library are stocked with a dozen volumes on “ANVIL LAW.”

In the world of Coyote vs. Acme, Acme is the monopoly of all monopolies. They have expanded past mere gag goods into manufacturing fighter jets, housewares, and most of the fundamentals of modern American living. No wonder Avery wanted to settle. As in Roger Rabbit, the animated walk among us—mainly in Albuquerque, where everyone relevant to the story seems to live (except for Elmer Fudd, who is now a United States senator)—and face a prejudicial society. This corresponds to limited work opportunities (at one point Porky Pig inquires about a nude modeling gig), and the cartoons often end up working for Acme, either as company apparatchiks or as test subjects (Daffy Duck, in particular, has been driven insane by the experience). One notable exception: Foghorn Leghorn, the blowhard cartoon rooster, who is the CEO of Acme and very much in on the fix. It’s a world of gross injustice. As Crane says on the phone with a client: “The law is completely on our side, because we wrote it.” 

In Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, Barrier writes that “in cartoon after cartoon, the Coyote is the victim of a hostile universe; the trucks that mow him down seem to have no human drivers.” In Burch’s script, the hostility comes not just from boulders but from the courts. (Burch, who also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for May December and the recent Arthur Schnitzler adaptation Late Fame, is known for more serious fare.) There are intimations of a two-tier justice system; when the case begins, the judge (Luis Guzmán) has two gavels—a regular one and a puffy cartoon one that squeaks when pounded. It doesn’t help that Avery is a very bad trial lawyer. He keeps referring to the Road Runner as “the bird” and struggles to drink water like a normal person in front of the jury. The tone of the media’s trial coverage confirms that Avery was right to want to lay low (newscaster: “plaintiff appears hungry and afraid”), and he seems poised to botch the case. 

But Acme has a lot of enemies, including a very specific rabbit in Deep Throat mode who tips Avery off about a clue hidden at a mental hospital for toons at 666 Scary Road Drive. This, ahem, rabbit hole takes Avery and Paige to a mysterious bucket of black paint that can create dark portals, and, in one of the film’s eeriest, most dreamlike scenes, the lawyers and Coyote venture through it into a lamplit tunnel with a cryptic message scrawled on the wall (and a train rushing at them at full-speed). This kind of surreal sequence runs alongside standard legal footwork, including a search through vintage Acme product catalogs on a microfiche machine. 

Throughout, Green and his team provide a barrage of clever, hilarious visuals. Here is a corrective to the contemporary problem of streaming services making content to watch out of the corner of your eye while, say, gambling on your phone: look away from the screen for even an instant and you’ll miss Coyote, after yet another failed chase, wearily depositing a molar into a paper cup labeled “Teeth”; John Cena sporting a different obscene bolo tie every time he swaggers into a scene; the “BEEP BEEP” pecked into a court summons by the elusive Road Runner; a courtroom stenographer dutifully transcribing the Tasmanian Devil’s incoherent ravings; a hitman’s car zooming off with a boulder-launcher attached to the roof; the Rube Goldberg trap that Coyote lays in the halls of Congress; the insane courtroom sketches after Avery’s disastrous opening statement (including one of Luis Guzmán screaming and running around with his robes on fire); or the state of Avery’s outfit in the scene where Crane screams, “You can’t walk away from me in a suit like that!” 

More surprising even than these inventive visual gags is the tone the film sometimes achieves. There are no Jessica Rabbits or Lola Rabbits here, no romances, but there is a good deal of longing; the Coyote of Coyote vs. Acme may be the most wistful Looney Tune on film. Once, as he’s hurled past Road Runner into oblivion yet again, his paw gently grazes the bird’s beak in slow motion, a moment so dreamily melancholy it belongs in a Wong Kar-wai movie. In another scene, one of Road Runner’s feathers drifts down as Coyote lies in a crater, and he goes on to carry it with him everywhere. Toward the end of the film, Coyote believes he has encountered Road Runner unawares on a street corner (though what he’s seen is, of course, a decoy), and he eyes his adversary with bird-shaped pupils, as eager for resolution as he is for dinner. These moments of yearning add weight to Avery’s climactic confrontation with Coyote, in which he yells: “You’ll never catch him!” I swear I heard gasps in the audience. 

The screening of Coyote vs. Acme I watched at the Museum of the Moving Image earlier this month was also attended by Forte and Condor, who hadn’t seen it since what they called “the funeral screening,” the first and only time it was shown after it had been completed and condemned back in 2023. Forte and Condor admitted they had both given up hope that it would ever be released; it seemed fated to be another innocent bystander mowed down by studios hurrying to become real-world Acme Corporations. But even in an age of Zaslavs and Leghorns, the spirit that leads someone to record the casual beep-beeps of a colleague or to dream up new jokes in the visual grammar of a seventy-seven-year-old cartoon is alive and well. For once, Coyote has bested a hostile world.