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Ducks Amuck

Crazy cartoon logic in a live-action world

by Ben Kenigsberg

November 11th, 2003 12:00 AM

Poultry in motion: Daffy with Jenna Elfman
photo: Suzanne Hanover (SMPSP)

Looney Tunes: Back in Action
Directed by Joe Dante
Warner Bros., opens November 14

Kabluey
Tracking Shots by Jim Ridley

Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
by McCann, Ruth

Diminished Capacity
Tracking Shots by Nick Pinkerton

Holding Trevor
Tracking Shots by Julia Wallace

We Are Together
Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor

Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein
by Tony Ortega

Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing?
Savage Love by Dan Savage

At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X
by Andy Kropa

Hancock
by Robert Wilonsky

Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires
La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto

The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17)
Nat Hentoff

Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9)
Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs

Triumph of the Lipstick Lesbians (7)
Jennifer Vanasco

Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6)
Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard

Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5)
Savage Love: Dan Savage

In the classic Looney episode "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century," Daffy Duck journeys to "Planet X"; in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, he meets Edgar Ulmer's Man From Planet X. The homage is oblique to the point of being deranged. It's the kind of reference that could spring only from the mind of Joe Dante, whose artfully eerie commercial films always offer reams of peripheral dividends for cinephiles. (Roger Corman, Robby the Robot, and Kevin McCarthy—pod in tow—all make cameos.) The director, sunnier than usual here, has never made a secret of his love for Warner's famous 'toons (Chuck Jones appeared in Gremlins and Innerspace, animated the bookends of Gremlins 2, and had a high school named after him in Explorers). In LT: BIA, Dante's masterstroke is to make the movie as visually and narratively unhinged as its source material. The heady non sequiturs—like Elmer Fudd surfacing for an impromptu chase though paintings by Seurat, Munch, and Dalí—are frequently hilarious. As in Dante's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, the live-action world operates with cartoon logic—Brendan Fraser goes splat almost as often as Wile E. Coyote, and even tussles with his double, à la "Duck Amuck."

More by Ben Kenigsberg

'Darshan, the Embrace'

Class Acts
Country stars, slave hunters headline Brazilian series

New York Stories
Brooding city dwellers populate a muddled post–9-11 ensemble piece

'Shem'

'Mendy: A Question of Faith'