Shade of the Art

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:51:14 -0500

Yesterday I saw Coyote vs. Acme. It’s enjoyable as heck and worth seeing in theaters, if only to vote with your dollars that this is still the kind of movie worth making. I don’t typically write movie reviews, but after seeing such a good movie, I only had one real grievance I felt kept it from being an all-timer. (No spoilers ahead.)

I didn’t love every second of the movie’s plot and pacing. A PG movie starring animated animals must cater to children, over-explain the plot and hit trademarked catchphrases as many times as possible. I can accept that. Well-made family films pack in just as many jokes that aim high and push the limits of the rating, and when those land right they’re even funnier for the adults watching¹.

But from a script and story perspective, I don’t really have notes. My issue is its visuals.

Of the four hybrid live-action and animated Looney Tunes films ever made, this might be the worst the gang has ever looked on the silver screen.

Like 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coyote vs. Acme puts cartoons and humans in the same world, so the 3D characters are meant to read as their original 2D selves. The film is clearly reaching for a cel-shaded style, but it doesn’t always work. Some scenes and characters look far better than others. I found Foghorn Leghorn especially hard to look at, and it might be the first time I’ve ever experienced the uncanny valley effect from a cartoon character.

Often, the CGI feels closer to 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle than to 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy, which was released by the same studio a year before Coyote vs. Acme started production.

It reminded me a lot of Fortnite’s skins for characters from traditional 2D animation. The game has featured 2D-inspired cel-shaded skins of Bugs Bunny, Hank Hill, Goku, Hatsune Miku and even 2D (the animated frontman of the band Gorillaz). Fortnite’s version of the effect is exaggerated and over the top, but I still think Epic Games figured out something that Warner’s animation group has not.

In fairness, there haven’t been many movies that mix live-action and animation with 3D-rendered characters expected to pass as their original 2D selves. Adaptations of Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Sonic the Hedgehog all sidestep the problem by reimagining them from scratch in 3D. I don’t necessarily think all of them turned out especially well (the original Sonic model was famously rather bad), but the new designs definitely have less uncanniness.

I could find only two real examples of characters transitioning to 3D while staying very close to their original look. The first is the 2021 mixed live-action Tom & Jerry movie, oddly enough also made by Warner Animation Group. The other is the 2022 Disney+ original Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, where the style is partly a gag because 2D characters in that world can opt for “CGI surgery” to improve their visual fidelity.

I decided not to count 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, because while the 2D crew comes ashore pretty well, they end up looking more like plasticized vinyl figurines than living cartoons.

I go to all the trouble of saying this because it’s an absolute shame, and likely indicative of just how little WBD believed in the film from the beginning. Money may not have been the only problem, but it seems likely to have been part of it. Modern 3D adaptations of 2D animation have had a real renaissance in the last few decades. One of the trailers I saw before the film was for the upcoming Bluey movie. I had heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Bluey and Bingo had a lot more visual fidelity in their appearance than any of the characters in Coyote vs. Acme, but it’s clearly “CGI surgery” and certainly isn’t being done on the cheap.

While writing this, I found a VFX reel from one of the effects houses that worked on the Disney+ Chip ’n Dale movie. Some of what made it into the final cut of Coyote vs. Acme feels closer to the Rescue Rangers’ PreVis footage than the finished shots. It makes me wonder if that’s part of what happened.

It’s no secret this film had a far smaller budget than the Space Jam sequel, and I’m sure recreating the traditional 2D effect from the original Space Jam and Back in Action would have cost more than the CGI they used instead. I accept Coyote vs. Acme for what it is despite the constraints it had to navigate just to get released. I still enjoyed it, and I still recommend it despite my own criticism.

If this were my own work, I think I’d have struggled to ship it as is. It’s by no means state-of-the-art, and I’m sure they knew that. But they shipped it anyway.

It isn’t the best-looking Looney Tunes movie ever made, but it’s good enough. I got to spend two hours in a theater enjoying it, and hours more talking and writing about it.

Existing like this is far better than not existing at all.

Shrek is one of the best examples of this. ↩︎

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 16:51:14 -0500

Coyote vs. Acme 🍿

Peter Lorre stars as a MacGuffin in a maul-teasing, fowl-conning farce about the lengths people will go to for the things they want.

The film is a love letter to golden age cartoons and film. Exactly what a no-taste exec would want to kill.

I give it 4 beep beeps out of 5.

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Shade of the Art