The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie ★★★

Released: 13 February 2025

Director: Peter Browngardt

It’s been tough going when trying to translate the iconic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes into a feature-length format.  Decades upon decades of flailing efforts which each mishandled or misunderstood the magic in some of Western animation’s most famous characters.  Space Jam, for all of its nostalgic pop, was a two-pronged excuse to cash in on the popularity of the precursor Nike ads and fund Michael Jordan’s training ahead of his return to basketball following the infamous baseball sabbatical.  Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action captured the anarchic spirit of the original shorts in spurts with some all-timer bits, but came at the cost of a movie with any coherence even before you factor in the disastrous production and 90% of the cast’s on-set misery.  As for Space Jam: A New Legacy, the Tunes weren’t even co-headliners, losing out in court minutes to LeBron James, CGI sleep-paralysis demon Don Cheadle, and almost literally every single other IP Warner Bros. has ever created or absorbed over its then-80+ years of existence.  The recent indignities visited upon them by the Warner-Discovery merger are only the tip of the iceberg, frankly. 

Whilst one could argue that the Tunes have never had a true shot at theatrical feature-length glory, always playing second-fiddle or being corporately stifled (or both), it does lead to the question of whether the extended format just inherently doesn’t suit them.  These are, after all, two-dimensional characters created for the purpose of 7-to-9-minute gag shorts.  Ones whose whole deal you can understand within the first 30 seconds, whose function in the short will be obvious almost as fast, and where almost every permutation of their whole deal and function can be ran through with great efficiency in that 7-to-9-minute window.  Perhaps little wonder they’ve spent their theatrical life either beneath their human co-stars or as very-cheaply produced linking material between compilations of those classic shorts.  It’d be like trying to make a feature-length movie out of Mary Katherine Gallagher (which Saturday Night Live did to predictable results). 

Making the Looney Tunes work outside of their gag short origins is doable, but it’s often come at the expense of the physical anarchic mayhem endemic to their appeal.  The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries struggled to square its 90s Saturday morning cartoon mystery narratives with the circle of traditional Sylvester & Tweety slapstick, but was a solid example of the former at a time where Warner Bros. Television Animation was on an absurd hot streak.  Although derided on release for those very things, The Looney Tunes Show remodelled the Tunes into a dialogue-heavy sitcom where the energy was way lower but the classic characterisations still shone through (as well as severely-reworking Lola Bunny’s personality into one of the standout Toons).  And, of course, we’d be remiss not to mention Tiny Toon Adventures, albeit with the caveats of most episodes pulling the ‘three segments in 22-minutes’ trick and their technically not even being the actual Looney Tunes. 

This brings us to The Day the Earth Blew Up.  Not the first animated feature-length Looney Tunes movie – there have been seven (Teen Titans GO! See Space Jam does not count) to-date, all released direct-to-video or streaming – but the first to get a theatrical release.  Much like its predecessors, director Pete Browngardt’s film is technically a spin-off of the then-current Looney Tunes TV series, HBO Max’s back-to-basics Looney Tunes Cartoons, and too was intended to go straight-to-streaming back in 2022.  Then, well, Warner Discovery and David Zaslav happened, so The Day the Earth Blew Up sat on the shelf for years until finally being rescued by other distributors (Ketchup Entertainment in the US, Vertigo Releasing here) and giving at least three of the Tunes their long-overdue non-compilation animated theatrical debut. 

Said Tunes are Porky Pig & Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza) with Petunia Pig (voiced by Candi Milo) acting as the former’s love interest.  Porky & Daffy here are non-blood siblings raised on a farm by their beloved Farmer Jim who, after Jim stiffly recedes into the sun one day, live in his rundown old house and do everything together; Porky the sensible yet easily-flustered one, Daffy the impulsively nutty conspiracy theorist.  When the roof of their house is wrecked by an asteroid, the pair are forced to get a job to pay for the repairs, lest they lose ol’ Farmer Jim’s home.  After a montage of failed attempts, a meet-cute with Petunia, a flavour scientist, at a diner leads the pair to work at the Goodie Gum factory where Daffy quickly discovers that their new gum, infected with goo from the earlier asteroid, is turning everyone into brainwashed zombies.  Soon enough, the trio must work together to cure humanity and repel a potential accompanying alien invasion. 

If that all sounds like the most late-90s direct-to-video energy you’ve heard in a hot minute… that’s because it kinda is, and I do not mean that as an insult.  There are sops to the more modern hyperactive kids’ animation and instantly-dated cultural references – one brief part of the failed jobs montage sees Daffy try to become a butt-shaking (always with the butts in Sam Register-produced cartoons) influencer, Boba Tea is both a character beat and a plot point, and there are a few scenes where Joshua Moshier’s functional score is replaced by pop song needle-drops.  But, for the most part, The Day the Earth Blew Up is unmoored from current trends.  It’s fast and energetic but not busy.  There are ten credited writers but the actual plotting and character work are kept relatively simple and contained; a solid skeleton for anybody wanting in to graft jokes around.  Rather than raising my heckles, the title cards showing all ten writers actually relaxed me, since it made me recall the late-90s era of Cartoon Network where all storyboarders on an episode pulled double-duty as the writers, and that seems to be what happened here. 

And these are, for the most part, solid jokes.  The fire-rate isn’t as fast as one might hope for a true Looney Tunes movie, but is at least of a pace with the Looney Tunes Cartoons series Browngardt show ran.  There’s a good balance between corny wordplay, squash-and-stretch slapstick, and character interplay with each feeling equally considered in the tri-force of Looney.  Just as often as the cast yelp and scream, there are sequences where Browngardt trusts in letting his character artists and animators be expressive enough to land a gag on their own.  The facial expressions carry the elasticity of the classic shorts and chuckles can be prompted just from how a character walks, such as the lumbering dum-dum nature of the scientist who becomes patient zero – or, in the case of the Grant Wood painting-reminiscent Farmer Jim, how they deliberately don’t walk.  Arguably, the comedy peaks early with the aforementioned job search montage, stylised to recall a lost Leon Schelesinger short complete with title card, and I can’t see anything imprinting itself onto a kids’ brain for all-time (like the best shorts or, for me, the “Pendulum of Doom” from Back in Action).  But it passes the five-laugh test with flying colours and, crucially, feels authentically Looney in a way these films simply haven’t till now. 

Similarly authentic are the art style and animation.  Sure, there are moments where the tight budget (just $15 million) makes itself evident, as with the conspicuous minimisation of crowd shots and sizes during the few action set pieces, plus a few early angles with rough inbetweening work.  Otherwise, the traditional-indebted animation has a pleasing broad exaggeration reminiscent of the Bob Clampett-era of shorts just with the improvements in shading afforded by modern technology.  There’s also a commitment to replicating the liminal spaces provided by the sharp yet minimalist backgrounds of the classic cartoons without going the whole hog and making these locations feel barren; a good middle-ground between Looney Tunes and the 50s sci-fi B-movies The Day the Earth Blew Up is riffing on. 

A lot of quiet, clever directorial choices have been made here.  An art-style indebted to what came before but not slavishly so.  Layout and camera choices perhaps guided by the restrained budget yet faithful to the franchise’s long history and never feeling cheap.  A solid enough and well-balanced central character dynamic that the scope comes off as succinct but never basic, that this is still A Looney Tunes Movie rather than a Daffy Duck & Porky Pig spin-off.  Whilst watching, I found myself comparing it positively to the most recent SpongeBob SquarePants movie, Search for SquarePants.  That film, sporting a budget quadruple what The Day the Earth Blew Up has, similarly tried to replicate the look and feel of its classic era for the big screen whilst focussing in on just a handful of core series characters.  But the commitment to imitating golden age SpongeBob’s whole aesthetic in 3D CG lead to a film whose static, flat horizontal shots with characters talking or staring slightly off-camera pasted in front of empty backgrounds and a diminished cast felt like a Nick, Jr. show which copped a bigger lighting budget. 

By contrast, and where the “direct-to-video” comparisons become most complimentary, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a small-scale movie where you can tell every creative decision with all those limitations has been carefully thought over to best maximise what it can achieve.  Even the obligatory character drama of Daffy and Porky’s growing distance from each other lands the beats required to sell some heart without derailing the flow or pushing the movie into something it isn’t.  Sure, it’s no classic, Eric Bauza’s yelling as Porky can start to become indistinguishable from Daffy’s normal speaking voice – not bringing back long-time Porky VA Bob Bergen is likely a cost-saving choice; regrettable nonetheless – and you’ll likely forget much of it within the weekend.  But that modesty is just as much its virtue when, after decades of trying, we finally have a Looney Tunes movie which feels like a proper Looney Tunes movie.