{"id":611494,"date":"2026-09-01T19:32:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T19:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/611494\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T19:32:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T19:32:21","slug":"inside-the-singular-animation-process-of-coyote-vs-acme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/611494\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Singular Animation Process of \u2018Coyote Vs. Acme\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains spoilers of scenes from Coyote Vs. Acme<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\n\tCoyote Vs. Acme was developed by director Dave Green<\/a> and colleagues in deep admiration of live action-animation<\/a> hybrid classics like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But the film was ultimately assembled in its own innovative, integrated way, from pre- to post-production. As first mapped out by producer Chris DeFaria, who was coming off of the Tom & Jerry movie, the process was as defined by the abilities of evolving technologies as by the determination to honor the traditional Looney Tunes<\/a> look.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie imagines Wile E. Coyote taking megacorporation Acme to court, having had enough of its endless supply of defective products getting in the way of his life\u2019s mission to catch the Roadrunner. This means wandering into the 3D, human world. Green\u2019s vision weaves deep cuts referencing courtroom thrillers like Erin Brockovich and The Insider into a warm, silly homage to some of the finest, most enduring 2D animation of all time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor over a year, Green and his crew \u2014 including editor Carsten Kurpanek, head story artist Carlos Lutterbach and animation and sketchvis producer Ryan Delaney \u2014 iterated the movie, story beat by story beat, and gag by gag. They exhaustively planned out the shoot to come, determining how the cartoons would interact with physical spaces before actually capturing them on camera, and worked in constant joke punch-ups and revisions. The result has captivated critics and audiences \u2014 and affirmed that the film deserved to see the light of day, after coming very close to disappearing into oblivion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen it got shelved, part of why it was so painful to the cast and crew is because we poured so much of ourselves into the process,\u201d Kurpanek says. \u201cEverybody that you talk to on this movie will have contact points with the movie saying: \u2018I own that. I own that.\u2019 And in a collaborative way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Hollywood Reporter spoke with Green and key figures of the animation team about how they executed this one-of-a-kind achievement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tStoryboards pinned to the wall for one of Wile E.\u2019s most elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions. Boards were arranged on velcro backing to help the assistant director and director arrange a shooting plan for the day.<\/p>\n

\t\tPre-Production\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDAVE GREEN (director) 2021 was largely dedicated to doing a Pixar-style story reel of the whole movie with a crew of animators from around the world. We would look at the script page and the animators would be the voice of Wile E., and they would say, \u201cWhat does Wile E. want here? How can we articulate his wants non-verbally?\u201d We had made the decision to go with the version of Wile E. that can\u2019t talk \u2014 he\u2019s one of the only actors who can\u2019t walk onto set and have actual dialogue with the human cast.<\/p>\n

\n\tRYAN DELANEY (2D animation producer and sketchvis producer) We always wanted the Looney Tunes to drive every sequence for us. That\u2019s how we storyboarded the whole movie. It was a little bit lockdowny. Dave and I were on Zoom all the time. He and Chris DeFaria became the people I saw more than my own family at that time. And Karsten came in as a live action editor. We were asking him to edit storyboards, but not a frame per beat kind of story \u2014 on twos and fours, and really trying to drive the energy through that.<\/p>\n

\n\tCARSTEN KURPANEK (editor) Normal, traditional animated movies do animatics for a year or two, and then you do CGI pipeline at the backend. We also did an animatic \u2014 but we didn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPorky\u2019s injury concepts, with artwork by Ryan Kramer, for the the file room at Avery, Jones, and Maltese, the law firm of Coyote Vs. Acme.<\/p>\n

\n\tGREEN This year was spent workshopping gags and physical comedy and figuring out how much Wile E. to have in the movie, how little Wile E. to have in the movie. We put the movie on its feet and really designed it and looked at it as a cut and figured out what should stay and what should go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCARLOS LUTTERBACH (head story artist, 2D animation) One thing that we knew right from the start is that we had to try and capture Chuck Jones\u2019 feel for the character of Wile E. When you look at how the design behaved, it\u2019s actually quite plastic. There\u2019s so much you can do with the cheeks, with the eyelids \u2014 sometimes a little nuance on how you position the eyelids would change expressions. I did a lot of how-to sheets that I shared, like, \u201cThis is how you construct his head, this is how plastic the eyebrows are, this is the kind of a thing that, if you shift a little bit, you\u2019ll get a different read on the expression.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK We basically split up the previs<\/a> and the Looney Tunes \u2014 the previs being a 3D approximation of each scene that looked purposefully like a PlayStation 3 cut scene, if you will. This was called sketchvis. It\u2019s not supposed to look final, just give you the blocking of the actors. Then the Looney Tunes action was drawn on top of it, based on the storyboards and then on punch-ups \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of collaboration, a lot of iterations. We recut the movie seven times in different layers.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY Daffy Duck was introduced into the Looney Tunes universe as chaos. But over time he became Bugs Bunny\u2019s jealous friend \u2014 it\u2019s what the modern movies turned him into. We were trying to work out, Where can Daffy sit in this movie? How does our Daffy sit into this movie? We found the perfect sequence where he could just be chaos incarnate, honoring his origins. We managed to get a couple of artists in from the TV cartoon series, and had them bring some sequences for us. Dave turned around to them and was like, \u201cWhat things are you not allowed to get away within your show? Let\u2019s put them in our movie.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tOne of many character expression illustrations by Dan Haskett, used early in the pre-vis phase to block in a basic expression set for Wile E. to express himself non-verbally.<\/p>\n

\n\tLUTTERBACH There was a big moment for us to figure out: What is Wile E.\u2019s house like, beyond what you\u2019d see in the classic cartoons? We were all just throwing ideas. Then I was handed the assignment and a lot of what I did was bring all of those ideas into one cohesive space. And then of course you go to review and other people also get a chance to work with you on that. When I asked Chris about that, he said, \u201cOh yeah, that\u2019s actually a very old school way of doing things, back if you had the storyboards on the wall.\u201d The wheel that is not broken and that sometimes gets forgotten that was there.<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK At one point, Wile E. opens a magazine. That magazine is the actual New Yorker article that the movie is based on. There are these little Easter eggs that we put in because we deeply cared about every single detail and all this builds on top of this thing.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDave Green<\/p>\n

\n\tGREEN The one year of story development and building that story reel for the film taught me that the camera is actually secondary to the actions of the cartoon characters.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY By the time the shoot rolled around, we\u2019d done 15 months\u2019 worth of thinking on the characters, composition, timing of gags, re-litigating shot by shot.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Shoot\t<\/p>\n

\n\tLUTTERBACH The biggest risk when you\u2019re working with live action and animation is the live action shoot forgetting what the animation is supposed to be doing in the scene.<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK We had a clear idea of what these scenes would be for Will [Forte] and any other actor that interacted with a cartoon character. They\u2019re obviously not on set, but we had Dave Barclay puppeteering for some of it. We always had something to show to the actors like, \u201cThis is the tone, this is what Wile E. is doing while you are doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLUTTERBACH The actors were very aware of what the [animated] characters should do. They knew where to look because we had [Barclay] in the movie, and if not, they had targets, and so we had space to work the characters back in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK What we wanted to avoid is sort of this acting against a tennis ball where we don\u2019t know what the tennis ball is up to.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY What you\u2019re hoping for is that they come back and have made it better. What you\u2019ll settle for is that they\u2019ve at least allowed the camera to do what you need the camera to do. But everything from the shoot that came back was awesome.<\/p>\n

\n\tLUTTERBACH A lot of what Wile E. is doing is just sit while these other two people are having a conversation. Keeping him alive was the biggest challenge in those situations. He remained Wile E., he remained all of the things you expected him to be, which is he\u2019s a guy that always has a plan. His mind is always functioning. He\u2019s never passive.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK We had an alpha layer of the Looney Tunes characters, which we were actually able to put onto the monitor on set \u2014 so the camera could match the reveal. If you go side by side, the shot is one to one what we had in the previs.<\/p>\n

\n\tDAVE The cartoon characters and their wants and their goals and their needs and the way they behave should, in an ideal world, determine what the camera does and not the opposite way around, if that makes sense. A lot of hybrid films are filmed with the approach of: \u201cWe\u2019ll figure out what the cartoons are going to do later.\u201d I had to unwind my traditional way of thinking, which is: Shot first and character second. It became character first.<\/p>\n

\n\tLUTTERBACH My proof of concept was the metal detector sequence. It was a place where Dave was testing real-world actors in a setting with a very comedic Wile E. being a Looney Tune character \u2014 he has all of this stuff that he takes out, and then we end up with a grenade and all of that. When that went to be shot, the environment was a completely different state than expected. It was one of the most different from what we had planned. But still, the spirit of it survived. So when doing the sketchvis, it wasn\u2019t so difficult to put him back in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK Joe Cobden actually played Foghorn Leghorn on set in a giant green screen suit. He\u2019s a great actor, but he\u2019s also a trained mime, which it turns out is really helpful for characters that don\u2019t speak. So we would show him the cut, and then he would do expressions, and then we would use that as a performance reference for Wile E.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY Once you start seeing all the practical effects, like the cars flipping and stuff like that, it was a relief to see the shoot crew go and do everything you hoped them to do.<\/p>\n

\t\tPost-Production\t<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK When you look at a single frame that holds for three seconds, people tend to get bored and want to cut it faster, make it faster. The problem is that once it becomes a moving image, the shot actually might require those three seconds. I made that mistake early on: You\u2019re just cutting it too tight because you want to make it snappy and make it play well.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY The bug sequence is fully 2D, and Witch Hazel too \u2014 there\u2019s a bunch of characters that are fully 2D rendered. No CG model was ever made for them. I\u2019d be surprised if the audience could tell.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK From a creative point of view, we would\u2019ve obviously liked doing 2D, but it\u2019s not feasible \u2014 too expensive. However, changes in editorial happened late in the game that then would require new VFX that weren\u2019t planned or budgeted for. So ironically, 2D was then more affordable and Duncan Studios was available. We\u2019d hand-draw things at a later stage to fill in some of the gaps that we just couldn\u2019t handle volume-wise with the effects side of things.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY CG is really good if you\u2019ve got moving cameras and you reuse the character over and over, and it changes how you can make decisions. In 2D, you have to commit to a performance and a camera really, really early.<\/p>\n

\n\tKURPANEK We had about 24 hours worth of film for the congressional sequence. Because we couldn\u2019t board the entire sequence, if you looked at very early cuts, there would just be a frame that would hold and have the dialogue underneath to indicate this is going to eventually be blocked and shot. It was fun to see, then, variations pop up \u2014 and you\u2019d cut different variations. We did mini test screenings where the entire editorial and the artists and the effects team got invited. We\u2019d screen a gag, we\u2019d screen another gag, whatever got the most response went in the cut until we got to an audience screening.<\/p>\n

\n\tGREEN I learned so much in post about how these characters had been done traditionally. And I learned so much from my animators about what their proper timings are, what their proper rhythms are, what these characters would and wouldn\u2019t do. Our story team was amazing at teaching me all that stuff.<\/p>\n

\n\tDELANEY The more you delve into the history, you learn about how the animators themselves came up with so many of these characters \u2014 and how they were the storytellers, episode by episode. We wanted to keep the characters as close to themselves as they always were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains spoilers of scenes from Coyote Vs. Acme] Coyote Vs. Acme was developed by director Dave…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3621,124833,257458,93,61,60,124835,270],"class_list":["post-611494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-animation","tag-coyote-vs-acme","tag-dave-green","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-looney-tunes","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}