How the ‘Looney Tunes’ Movie Overcame Odds to Make it to the Big Screen

The day the earth exploded: looney tunes moviesThe first fully animated film based on the Looney Tunes characters opened in U.S. theaters on December 13, but it almost didn’t materialize. several times.

“I was waiting for that phone call at least three or four times during production. [to shut down the movie],” said director Peter Browngardt. “It’s been a bumpy ride.”

That’s putting it mildly. Browngardt was hired to produce and direct in mid-2021 The day the earth exploded as his feature film debut. Browngardt is a writer on the critically acclaimed HBO Max Looney Tunes The reboot, a new series of original shorts featuring the classic Tunes character, seems to prove there’s an audience for more Looney. Browngardt and his team of writers (about 15 writers and story consultants worked on the film) came up with an original idea involving Daffy Duck and Piggy revealing a secret plot by aliens to take over Earth through mind-controlled bubble gum. These two iconic characters must save the planet without driving each other crazy.

The day the earth exploded Planned as a Max original film, but like many Warner Bros. projects – see batgirl and Coyote and Acme – After the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery Channel in early 2022, the film fell into a restructuring. Having its world premiere at this year’s Annecy Animation Film Festival, Ketchup Entertainment is an independent distributor not known for children’s programming (previous releases include Hellboy: Crooked Man and Robert Rodriguez” hypnotics), seizing the domestic copyright. The film will be eligible for Oscars on December 13 before being shown on 1,500 screens in February.

in a wide-ranging conversation hollywood reporterBrowngardt recounts the fight through corporate mergers, budget cuts, strikes and a pandemic to gain access to The day the earth exploded On the big screen.

The whole project has such a crazy production history, starting out as a series for Max, then becoming a feature, then being shelved, then coming back again. Was there a time when you despaired that this movie was going to be, I don’t know, the next one? batgirl And be canceled entirely?

About three different times, maybe four different times during production, I was waiting for that phone call [to shut down the movie]. It’s been a bumpy journey. Basically we got greenlit for Max and then merged with the Discovery Channel, so Warner Bros. was in debt and they started cutting a lot of projects. But our feature budget was very limited, about $15 million, so we were last on the list. They choose the big stuff first and then keep coming down and cutting and cutting. But because we were small enough, we got permission to continue production. I think they liked what they saw, too. Then we got permission to try and sell the film outside the studio, so we shopped around [to other streaming services] But no one wants it.

At that time, there was so much fear about the future of streaming that people stopped spending money. Warner Bros. International was briefly interested in distributing the film [outside the U.S.] But then the strike happened and that kicked us out because they were focused on Dune: Part 2 as well as their other hit movies. They needed marketing, so they passed. We had to go outside. We bought it like you would buy any independent film at a festival. The British company GFM Animation did some international sales, but Ketchup Entertainment came to the rescue. If we didn’t get domestic distribution, it would be over. They attended the screening in Annecy and it went really well and we got a great response and great press. They fully support it. The film will be released on 1,500 screens in February, which is fantastic. We basically made an independent film through Warner Bros. How surreal is this?

Oddly, the first fully animated Looney Tunes movie was released independently rather than through Warner Bros.

Yes, there have been compilation movies before, e.g. Daffy Duck Movie: The Magic Island (1983) or Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979) They stitched together old classic shorts. And then there are [live-action/animation features] space jam Thing, it’s basically a sneaker commercial. But it was the first original, fully animated film to feature a Looney Tunes character. It’s crazy to think that they’ve been around for over 80 years and have never been used before. I think you could make a lot of movies with these classic animated characters – Pug, Duffy, even Mickey Mouse and Goofy. a stupid movie (1995) was a great inspiration to us.

Why did you choose Daffy Duck and Porky Pig for this film instead of Bugs Bunny, which had a higher box office?

One of the reasons we chose Porky and Daffy is that they don’t always want to kill each other. Most of the other characters in Looney Tunes are always trying to murder each other, hunt rabbits, etc. But we knew we had to do an emotional story. As much as we loved writing jokes, we knew we had to really dig deep and find a story that would engage the audience for 90 minutes. In keeping with the Looney Tunes style, we had to define them and the relationships between them and move them through. But I don’t want to change them. At the end of the movie, it’s still Daffy Duck and Piglet. They’ve all been there and maybe have some understanding of each other, but they’re still the same characters.

You also stayed true to the animation style. This movie looks very old school Looney Tunes.

My point is this: You don’t reinvent Looney Tunes. You just keep making them. They have tried to redesign them in the past, but it was in vain. Something like Looney Tunes, it worked perfectly, these character archetypes, the style, everything was like winning the lottery. Don’t mess with it. You keep at it and you refine, refine, refine again. I mean, they’re the greatest cartoon characters of all time. These shorts are probably the best comedy shorts in film history, ranking them alongside Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But Looney Tunes worked with classic directors for 40 years, and they played a lot of the style on the old shorts, with more graphic backgrounds, lusher backgrounds. Even with the characters, you can always see the director’s or animator’s hand in the design. It was never strictly a copy-and-paste model, it was very organic.

We did a lot of homework on this movie. I recorded all the Looney Tunes shorts. There are about 1,030 of them, not all of them are available, but someone has a way to get them, get a copy. I’d like to have them as Quick Time videos on the project’s server so we can all refer to them. It’s like having the operations manual at your fingertips. We went to a lot of staff meetings, we watched the shorts, we studied them, we broke down the characters, how they moved, and how they spoke.

But we also took inspiration from other films. we talked a lot Dumb and Dumb and Borat. or a movie like this asshole With Steve Martin: A comedy movie with a strong, iconic character that has an emotional thread, but doesn’t really change.

There are many writers on this movie. Is this more of a writers room setting, like a TV show?

I get asked this question a lot. So I put together an early draft with screenwriter Kevin Costello. But Kevin, me and Alex [Kirwan] Along with several other crew members, we made the entire film over Zoom during the pandemic. We’d be on the phone for 3 to 4 hours, go through the entire movie, think about sequences, and then abandon them. Every animated piece I’ve made in my career has an outline and a rough rhythm line, rather than a script, because I find storyboarding to be part of writing. When you create comics, you are writing and drawing at the same time. I like that. That’s how I got into TV animation in the first place. I feel like the best cartoon humor and Looney Tunes style humor comes from having the cartoonist write the material. So Kevin wrote a great first draft and some of the stuff is still in the movie, but except for Darrick [Bachman]who was the right writer, who came in later and typed some stuff up, and everyone else was a storyboard artist and writer. I worked hard with the studio to get them full credit. The studio hates to do this, but we’re writers. We are writing these words that come out of these dynamic mouths. We are documenting every action they are taking. This happens with all animated features. If you would sell the original script of this movie with Shrek Or any of these things, it was pretty much reinvented from scratch four or five times before the final version. One of the things I’m most proud of about this film is that I was able to give people the credit they deserve. I wish the animators would join the WGA, but that’s another story entirely.

I said this movie had an old school Looney Tunes feel, but also had a lot of reference humor, breaking the fourth wall, etc. It reminded me a lot of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network cartoons.

Correct. I think it’s in our DNA. We can no longer write jokes that are exactly right for 1945. When I was at CalArts, we had a great guest speaker, a director and animator, who said, “Don’t worry about always being original. Just be yourself and put your heart and soul into what you’re doing, The originality and tone will come through. My tone and humor are definitely Cartoon Network-y. spongebob All that stuff is there, but it also applies to everyone who works on the set. I mean Warner Bros. Animation has only made one movie before, the Teenage Brawler movie [2018’s Teen Titans Go! To the Movies]. None of us, or almost none, had ever done feature work before. We treated it like we were making an 11-minute cartoon for Cartoon Network. We work very fast, very quickly and cheaply. This is the style of humor of our generation. I don’t have any firm rules. If it’s a good joke and it’s contemporary — like the carpool jokes in our movies or our coffee jokes — but it makes us laugh, then it’s going to stay.

The film ends with a nod to a potential sequel. What are the chances of doing this? Do you still have it? [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David] Zaslav’s speed dial number?

I won’t hold your breath. But it’s above my pay grade. I left the studio in February, and the day I approved the final version of the film was, quite literally, my last day at Warner Bros. So I don’t know what the future of Looney Tunes, that company, or that world will look like. But I think if you put these characters in the right hands, it has a great future. I had a great time, a great experience making this film. I think you could use these attributes to make a Looney Tunes movie. The only obstacle is that many kids don’t know who Daffy Duck is, which I discovered while participating in some test groups for the Looney Tunes short film project. Disney has always been good at making Mickey Mouse a focus for the younger generation, which is why they have preschool shows and Mickey shows for different levels. Warner Bros. didn’t do that with “Looney Tunes.” I think this is a mistake because in my opinion Looney Tunes are the better characters.