As a introduction to the film, I use bits from this article from the New York Times to illustrate why Joe Dante was the best director for the film.
A Chuck Jones Biopic? Animation and live action? First time I've heard this, but wow - wouldn't that have been great. By the way, who here doesn't love the "Gremlin Stew" opening to Gremlins II?When a former writer for "The Simpsons," Larry Doyle, proposed a new "Looney Tunes" feature and a new series of short cartoons to executives at Warner Brothers, Mr. Dante seemed an obvious choice to direct the feature. He'd been weaned on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the other Warners cartoons that preceded the junky science-fiction and horror pictures he consumed as a boy in Middletown, N.J. He'd even asked the Warners animator Chuck Jones to work on his "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990) and had spent years developing a Jones biopic, "Termite Terrace," which would have blended live action and animation — had Warners found the project sufficiently commercial.
Yeah. An Micheal Jordan's so popular outside America too.For Warners executives, ever on the hunt for merchandise opportunities and "tent poles" (big projects that usher in a lot of ancillary ones), a Looney Tunes feature like "Back in Action" would reinject the characters into the popular imagination. Of course, they've really never left, but now there are scores of other franchisable cartoons competing for parents' dollars. And while a previous live-action/animation feature, "Space Jam" (1996), was a box-office hit, it was more of a vehicle for Michael Jordan than for the Looney Tunes characters. The film homogenized their anarchic personalities: where was the fun in watching them work together as a team?
Actually I don't think Space Jam was that bad - It's better than the 80's Looney Tunes on the new Space Jam disc for instance. But it should have been so much better.Ooh. Executive demands. We like them... not."Looney Tunes: Back in Action" cost more than $100 million and, according to Mr. Dante, studio executives never groused about the budget: they just kept throwing money at him. Unfortunately, they threw other things at him too.
The curse of digital editing. Time, money and effort wasted.The problem was how simply the movie could be reworked on a computer. After Mr. Dante had shot the live actors and backgrounds, anything could be added to the frame. "Once you've told people that they can change things, they think they should change things," he said. "Some of the jokes are the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, maybe 20th pass at the same joke. We just kept rewriting. This is usually not a good idea — and on a number of occasions we ended up going back to the original joke."
Many hours and tens of thousands of dollars later, he might have added.
Brendon Fraser plays the stunt double of Brendon Fraser? How super genius is that?As Bugs Bunny watches, amused at what a "maroon" Daffy is, the duck is stripped of his moniker (the studio claims copyright) and ordered thrown off the lot. The luckless guard who has to do the deed is Bobby (Brendan Fraser), who also works as a stunt double for Brendan Fraser (Mr. Fraser again, in a snotty cameo) and is the son of a movie secret agent (Timothy Dalton) — who's also a real secret agent who has been kidnapped by the diabolical head of the Acme Corporation (Mr. Martin), who . . . .
Here comes the meddling:
Quite.Making such asides, or "breaking the fourth wall," was part of the identity of the great Warners cartoons (in contrast to the more conservative Disney fairy tales). But the practice made modern studio executives anxious.
"The phrase I heard the most was, `If you do that, it takes you out of the movie,' " Mr. Dante said. "And my retort was, `You're already out of the movie.' It's not like a normal picture where you get emotionally invested to the point where you believe that you're not watching a movie. The artifice of the movie should be constantly thrust upon you; that was the whole point of Looney Tunes."
Quite.One of the first debates was over guns. "It's post-Columbine," Mr. Dante said, "so how many gunshots can we have? Can Yosemite Sam have a gun at all? Briefly we made him a pirate. Then we recast it in terms of cartoon violence versus real violence, so the dictum was that there would be no real weapons in the movie. There would only be cartoon weapons and cartoon bang-bangs, and only cartoon characters will be injured — if that, because they never really are injured, they're just put back together again."
"We couldn't not deal with that, even though I think it's ridiculous," he said. "I don't think that Roadrunner cartoons ever made any kid go out and shoot their brother or put the dog in the microwave. I think kids are smarter than that. However, parents — who are the people who go to the previews and fill out the cards and recommend movies to other parents — feel dodgy about the subject of violence and cartoons. Well, sorry: Elmer Fudd comes from an agrarian society where people shoot their food."
Quite."There's a way to have your character behave that's better for telling a story, and a way to have your character behave that is true to the character," Mr. Dante said. "Bugs has a very defined persona. He's the chairman of the board, the hip character who never loses his cool and is always above everything — which makes him, oddly, difficult to write for. I can't tell you how many times executives said, `We want Bugs to do this,' and we said, `No, that's not what Bugs would do, that's what Daffy would do.' " And they said, `We're sick and tired of hearing what Bugs would do and wouldn't do.'
"There was an idea to have a scene where Bugs reveals his vulnerability — and then we thought: `No! We'd be cashing in the whole character after 60 years!' "
Mr. Goldberg agreed. "Being animated, the cartoon cast couldn't really speak for themselves," he said. "So often I really had to represent them. I felt like I was channeling them. Sometimes I'd fight over nuances, but sometimes it was big things. During one big argument somebody said, `Does Bugs have to say, "What's up, Doc?" ' "
I'm confident Dante has made the best movie he could (given the circumstances) and I'm sure it will be another Dante home run.
