Cast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol, Fred Tatasciore, Laraine Newman
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi
Director: Peter Browngardt
In Irish Cinemas: Now
Despite its explosive title, The Day the Earth Blew Up, the first fully animated Looney Tunes feature, keeps things surprisingly modest. Rather than dipping into the full Warner Bros. cartoon vault, the film narrows its focus to a tight trio: Daffy Duck and Porky Pig front and centre, with Petunia Pig rounding out the cast as the calm, capable counterbalance. The stakes flirt with blockbuster scale, saving the house, maybe even the planet, but the film never leans too heavily into grandeur. Everything unfolds with a breezy, cartoonish sensibility that keeps the spotlight firmly on the bickering chemistry between Daffy and Porky.
Still, the film stays breezy. Over its roughly 80-minute runtime, the madcap energy rarely escalates into something truly unhinged. Classic Looney Tunes at their best are anarchic, inventive, even a little dangerous, gleefully dismantling logic, characters, and sometimes the fourth wall itself. Here, director Peter Browngardt keeps things spinning neatly in orbit. The film nods to vintage 1950s sci-fi and the paranoia-laced remakes that followed, but the references are delivered with a dutiful steadiness rather than wild invention. For all the cosmic stakes, it plays more like a carefully wound toy than a firework.
One of the film’s quirks is how small it feels, particularly in its performances. Eric Bauza pulls double duty, voicing both Daffy and Porky, and carries the bulk of the film by bouncing those personalities off each other in nearly every scene, whether they’re slogging through shifts at a chewing gum factory or fumbling their way through a close encounter with an alien threat. Supporting voices drift in and out, a gleefully over-the-top extraterrestrial, a practical-minded Petunia, but the ensemble remains surprisingly lean. Even cameo turns from minor authority figures barely expand the world. For a story about mind control and impending global doom, it unfolds on an oddly intimate scale.
Behind the scenes, though, the project is anything but small. A hefty team of writers drawn from the recent Looney Tunes Cartoons revival shapes the film’s tone, and that pedigree is immediately obvious. The humour comes in rapid bursts, swinging from old-school slapstick, exaggerated sight gags, and visual absurdity to more contemporary, internet-age silliness. It’s rarely uproarious, but it’s consistently competent: polished, professional comedy engineered for steady chuckles rather than belly laughs. Stretching this rhythm from short-form episodes into a feature-length one, however, exposes the scaffolding. The longer runtime occasionally reveals thin plotting and repetitive beats, with the eye sometimes wandering to flat backgrounds or filler moments.
Even so, flashes of visual flair break through the uniformity. Certain sequences indulge in playful stylistic detours, an opening that evokes mid-century animation nostalgia, or a factory montage that leans into stylised design. The most striking diversion arrives with an unexpectedly earnest backstory for Daffy and Porky. While the inclusion feels somewhat obligatory, the sequence’s syrupy Americana aesthetic is offset by a slyly grotesque edge, injecting a welcome jolt of weirdness into proceedings.
That off-kilter energy is something the film could use more of. For a story riffing on alien invasions and end-of-the-world hysteria, the chaos often feels curiously restrained. Even the film’s most outrageous moments, like a grotesque gum-based creature running amok, are staged as conventional set pieces rather than full-blown cartoon lunacy. A montage scored to a familiar apocalypse anthem typifies the film’s cautious streak: technically solid, but a touch too safe for a franchise built on gleeful rule-breaking.
Yet there’s a certain charm in its restraint. While it may never reach the delirious heights of the classic shorts, the film functions as an accessible gateway into the Looney Tunes universe. It’s a tidy, undemanding romp that trades anarchic brilliance for dependable fun, and for younger audiences, especially, it might serve as a nudge toward the rich, chaotic archive that made these characters icons in the first place.
Overall: 7/10
Movie Reviewer
