In the age of President Donald Trump, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has been gutted and the Food and Drug Administration is being run by quacks. Because the government no longer shields the public from predatory financial institutions or irresponsible purveyors of food and medicine, Americans are being exploited by banks and credit unions while consuming dangerous foods ranging from glass-riddled bread to diarrhea-inducing lettuce.

If that is an unusually serious way to open a review of a Looney Tunes movie, it is because "Coyote vs. Acme" carries a surprisingly somber story. Starring Will Forte, Lana Condor, PJ Byrne and John Cena, and directed by Dave Green from a script by Samy Burch, "Coyote vs. Acme" follows the Warner Bros. cartoon Wile E. Coyote (who never speaks here, although he occasionally piped up in the original cartoons) as he sues the Acme Corporation for selling him defective products during his ongoing quest to capture the Road Runner (Eric Bauza). The coyote and the Road Runner have traded slapstick antics across dozens of short cartoons since 1949, when animator Chuck Jones created the pair, but they have never before anchored their own feature-length motion picture. Here, the titular coyote recruits lawyers Kevin and Paige Avery (Forte and Condor) to prove that Acme should be held accountable for his pain and suffering — or, at least, that is how it first appears.

A work of genius

The genius of "Coyote vs. Acme" — and the term is not used lightly — lies beneath its characteristically hilarious cartoon antics: this is a film filled with surprises and subtext. It explicitly invokes the myth of Sisyphus, the ancient Corinthian king condemned to an afterlife of forever rolling a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down whenever it nears the top. The modern French philosopher Albert Camus argued that Sisyphus' punishment, rather than torture, was actually a form of paradise. In his 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus", Camus wrote: "Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."

Camus concluded: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The beauty of "Coyote vs. Acme" is that it reimagines its hapless hero as an aspirational rather than tragic figure, his perpetual failures reminding audiences that the journey as well as the destination are worth savoring, even when they do not turn out exactly as expected. On top of this existential meditation, the film doubles as a scathing commentary on corporate America, with the Acme Corporation standing in for the corrupt mega-businesses that dominate the real world. Even though life is meant to be a struggle, that does not mean those who live it should be subject to the whims of the powerful and unethical — a point the film drives home through villainous lawyers Buddy Crane (Cena) and Bill Pellicano (Byrne), who answer to a CEO, the cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn (Bauza).

Within "Coyote vs. Acme," Wile E. Coyote is simultaneously hilarious punchline and heartbreaking punching bag. His plight recalls another literary figure: American humorist Mark Twain, whose description of coyotes in the 1872 book "Roughing It" inspired his animated counterpart. The coyote, Twain wrote, is "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it."

A great kiddie flick

If this sounds too heady for little ones, no worries. At the packed screening attended on an early Friday afternoon, children hooted and hollered at the wall-to-wall gags with such glee that the reviewer would have smiled with nostalgia — having also been raised on Looney Tunes — even without frequently chuckling (which he was). Like all great family movies, "Coyote vs. Acme" operates on two levels: deep philosophical and social commentary for adults, juvenile jokes for kids, and a fast-paced, funny story that works for both.

If there is any justice in the world, "Coyote vs. Acme" will become the first Looney Tunes movie to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (six have won Best Animated Short Film, all between 1947 and 1958, and none starring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner). Even if other great animated features arrive in 2026, none will match "Coyote vs. Acme" in combining top-notch writing, comedy and animation with a historical pedigree stretching back decades.

An Oscar win would also be the ultimate triumphant note for a movie that Warner Bros. did not even want audiences to see. As Decider's Jesse Hassenger explained: "Unlike those more grown-up movies we mentioned, it's not the content of 'Coyote vs. Acme' that caused Warner Bros. to drop the movie. (It's a solid PG, a rarity these days.) It's not the quality, either. (We'll get to that shortly.) It was part of a cost-saving measure that also claimed the not-yet-finished Batgirl and a Scooby-Doo animated feature. Executives decided it would be more worthwhile to claim these movies as tax write-offs than actually attempt to make money by releasing them. To claim said write-off, the movies would have to be, essentially, locked in a corporate vault and never shown."

Given the plot and historical context of "Coyote vs. Acme," that backstory resonates more profoundly than it otherwise would. The irony is hard to miss: a film about a small claimant suing an all-powerful corporation was itself nearly destroyed by a corporate accounting decision, made by executives who never had to answer to the coyotes of the world.

At the time of writing, Warner Bros. was being greedily eyed by David Ellison, the billionaire heir who seems determined to purchase major media companies and turn them into bastions of pro-Trump coverage (see his alleged firing of comedian Stephen Colbert and confirmed terminations of principled journalists at "60 Minutes"). While the suppression of "Coyote vs. Acme" had nothing directly to do with Trump, indirectly that act of censorship is quite consistent with Trump-era values: instead of sharing a great work of art with the public, Warner Bros. wanted to bury it to make a few extra bucks. (Ultimately, after widespread public outcry, the studio sold it to distributor Ketchup Entertainment.) More pointedly, at a time when Trump is dismantling institutions that protect the public from oligarchical avarice, "Coyote vs. Acme" launches a missile directly into the "might makes right" ethos promulgated by Trump and his supporters.

Closing with Chris Dodd

Watching "Coyote vs. Acme" brought to mind the reviewer's 2025 Democracy at Work interview with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who co-authored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Asked about Trump's destruction of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which Dodd-Frank created, the former lawmaker offered a pointed observation about Trump's larger agenda: "That is, of course, just to destroy the ability of consumers, individually and generally, to have the kind of protections that they deserve to have, particularly people who live paycheck to paycheck trying to survive."

It is very much by design that, in Trump's America, everyone not in cahoots with Acme is Wile E. Coyote — living in want, "always hungry" and "always poor, out of luck, and friendless," always one greedy and cruel business decision away from humiliation and physical hardship.

Unlike the coyote, though, there is nothing noble in America's ongoing fanatical refusal to quit Trump. That recalls the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana, whose definition of "fanatic" inspired one of Chuck Jones' rules governing Wile E. Coyote's behavior: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."

Because it captures all of these themes in its own looney way, "Coyote vs. Acme" is a literal work of genius — the very description Wile E. Coyote perennially applies to himself. It is both timeless and very much a product of its moment: a light-hearted comedy romp and a genuine contemplative look at the meaning of life.

There is not a single person to whom this film would not be recommended.

Source: Alternet