Coyote Vs. Acme Vs. the Flawed Adaptations of The Past

Coyote Vs. Acme Vs. the Flawed Adaptations of The Past

This is the way.

Coyote Vs. Acme lives! Although it certainly doesn’t pose a box office threat to the staggering receipts pulled in by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Warner’s—or rather, Ketchup’s—new semi-animated revisiting of a classic Looney Tunes feature overperformed at the box office and has already made back about a third of what Ketchup paid for the rights. That’s good! Especially for fans of traditional animation, who don’t necessarily want all of their cartoons to showcase a fully rendered 3D gloss or, worse, telltale signs of stomach-churning AI-generated slurry.

Even better, at least from a creative perspective, is that Coyote Vs. Acme has earned nearly universal praise for its sharp writing, timely narrative themes, and above all its writers’ and director’s impeccable understanding of the classic property they’ve adapted to film. It might seem difficult to bring the old Road Runner shorts to a contemporary drama featuring live actors in a grounded setting, but somehow it works. You have John Cena and a struggle against corporate malfeasance on one hand, and a famished wild dog desperate to capture and devour a single speedy bird by outsmarting it in a surreal version of the American Southwest on the other.

In fact, Coyote Vs. Acme arguably stands at the pinnacle of the modern trend of converting classic works into fastidiously faithful new interpretations. The acme, as it were. It hit theaters just as Science Saru’s incredibly dense and widely acclaimed redux of Ghost in the Shell nears the end of its run on Amazon Prime, where it has vibrantly and unapologetically transformed Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk manga from the 1980s and ’90s into a completely accurate screen portrayal. It also follows in the footsteps of recent revisits to other classic Japanese comics including Fist of the North Star, Urusei Yatsura, and Ranma 1/2, all of which take far fewer liberties with the source material than older adaptations. At the same time, Coyote Vs. Acme runs in tandem with the penultimate season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which has taken serious heat this year for leaning so heavily into gimmick episodes and losing sight of the tone and themes of the original Star Trek saga to which it’s meant to function as a prologue. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones fans couldn’t say enough good about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which may not have been a literal page-for-page translation of George R.R. Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” saga, but certainly celebrated the spirit of those short stories. The message is clear: Fidelity is cool.

That doesn’t mean we don’t love new ideas, of course. Coyote Vs. Acme is not a direct adaptation of any vintage storyline and tells its new story (which borrows concepts but not content from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) in a way that feels entirely in keeping with rules and histories of the characters that power the narrative. Sure, those recent manga-to-anime works sometimes adhere to the source material so precisely that you can recognize entire panels from the printed page there on the screen, but they demonstrate a respect and admiration for the original work that was often lost in earlier translations. The original Fist of the North Star adaptations cranked up the violent nihilism at the expense of downplaying protagonist Kenshiro’s kind, protective side—which is the entire key to both his personalty and his heroic status. The classic Urusei Yatsura TV series, while beloved, was often more interested in creative lead Mamoru Oshii’s personal obsessions and sense of humor than in the stories and comedy that made Rumiko Takahashi’s manga so popular in the first place.

Not for nothing, Oshii also translated Ghost in the Shell to film back in the 1990s with a groundbreaking theatrical release that played fast and loose with the source material. And that was the right choice for the time! Ghost in the Shell would not have become an international success if Oshii had given up on his vision of contemplative existentialism contrasted against immense violence in favor of Shirow’s quirky blend of technical wonkery, enthusiastic perviness, and gag-style humor. But 30 years later, the international audience at large has developed a greater appreciation for the offbeat humor and nuanced storytelling of great Japanese manga. All those years of watching Luffy D. Monkey mug his way through hundreds upon hundreds of episodes again escalating odds and ever-more-powerful foes have taught us a few things about laughing in the face of danger, maybe.

Or maybe it’s just that cynicism and self-consciousness are on the outs. Five years ago, something like Coyote Vs. Acme probably would have had a similar tone to Space Jam 2, a film that seemed almost embarrassed of itself. Hollywood adaptations of original works spent decades trying to distance themselves from those works, to put down the creations that brought them into existence in the first place. Sometimes, that distance was necessary—Peter Jackson made a lot of smart calls in making The Lord of the Rings palatable to the masses without undermining the underlying themes of Tolkien’s work!—but it just as often made a mockery of things—Peter Jackson made a lot of bad calls in transforming children’s novella The Hobbit into an epic three-film cycle! Even in the mass-manufactured film pulp that are superhero movies, audiences are more willing to embrace sincerity… and maybe even embrace cringe. 2000’s X-Men had to wink at the audience by having Wolverine make fun of the other characters and their comic book costumes to get the average filmgoer to buy in to its premise of impossibly powerful mutants seeking equal rights. Deadpool & Wolverine cheerfully put Hugh Jackman into yellow spandex and winked at the audience to let them know that it’s OK to have fun.

Well, Deadpool & Wolverine winked at the audience constantly, really. Probably too much. But even so, that speaks to a newfound acceptance among film-loving viewers: sometimes it’s fine to let a thing simply be what it is. The Super Mario and Sonic movies don’t engage in preposterous dialogue convolutions to let you know that they’re so over video games and that the idea of a (1) little guy who eats mushrooms to fight a dragon or (2) a little guy who runs really fast to battle Jim Carrey is totally fine. It’s not high art! Why be so snooty! You paid 20 bucks for two hours of entertainment, and the real world is a mess, so why not just let yourself be entertained for two hours?

This also accounts for the recent ascendance of the horror genre. The same lowering of your guard that allows you to enjoy a cartoon on its own terms also lets you be scared or vulnerable to a work of fiction. It’s engagement. It’s accepting a deliberate work of creativity and allowing it to sink its hooks into you. As algorithm-chasing mediocrity and auto-generated swill increasingly clog the mediascape, there’s something refreshing about a work that someone put together to express an idea or point of view… even if they were a little messy about it. And if that work has genuine merit, like Coyote Vs. Acme? Well, that’s all the better.