The big new news from Warner Bros. Animation — a short-format revival of the Looney Tunes cartoons franchise — went down, with one short "The Curse of the Monkey Bird" screening to thunderous applause at a sneak peek Monday in Annecy.
It was all part of an Annecy Fest Look Ahead by Warner Animation Group (WAG) and Warner Bros. Animation (WBA), co-hosted by executive VP Allison Abbate and VP Audrey Diehl, which also took in "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies" and "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part," climaxing with an eight-minute excerpt from "Smallfoot."
The Looney Tunes cartoons will be 1 to 6 minutes in length, with WBA aiming to produce 1,000 minutes in all, Diehl said. Fifty shorts of varying length are in production. The series features veteran Looney Tunes voice cast members including Jeff Bergman and Bob Bergen, and newcomer Eric Bauza taking the reins as Bugs, Daffy and Tweety.
"I wanted to go back to the '40s 'Looney Tunes,' late '30s, early '40s, super irreverent, super bananas, high energy. They pushed the surrealism, the high physicality of the animation, the expressions in the animation," said executive producer Peter Browngardt, displaying character designs from different artists for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among others.
All episodes will be in classical 2D animation, Browngardt said, sparking a large round of applause from the Annecy audience.
Browngardt said Warner Bros. Animation would play with "different styles in the shorts, some looking a bit more art deco, some more graphic, other flatter and 'designy.'"
Spoofing an "Indiana Jones" tomb-caper, and shown in animatics, "The Curse of the Monkey Bird" featured Daffy Duck and Porky Pig venturing inside a jungle temple-pyramid, in search of its allegedly cursed treasure. The Annecy audience ate up in particular one inspired sequence where, thanks to Daffy's ineptitude, Porky is, in just a few seconds: shot by paralyzing arrows, punched by a giant boxing glove, crushed by a mace, blown up and made victim to a trap floor, plunging to a subterranean level where Daffy, unscathed, joins him.
"WAG is dedicated to the development of smart, irreverent comedies," which don't forget physical comedy," said Abbate. Aided by the studio's heritage franchises, WAG aims by 2021 to be making two fully animated feature and one hybrid movie a year, striking up synergies with studio sister companies. "We are even starting to do our first DC projects," Abbate noted.
