or more than 65 years, the Looney Tunes characters have been entertaining children and adults alike with their clever antics and timeless, irreverent humor. In 1988, some of the Looney Tunes gang made cameo appearances in the landmark live-action/animation hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The characters found themselves interacting with real live humans—notably basketball star Michael Jordan—once again in 1996 for the Warner Brothers vehicle Space Jam. Now the Looney Tunes are sharing the screen with the likes of Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman and Steve Martin in their latest film, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which opened Friday.
Elfman is best known for her role as the spirited Dharma in the ABC series Dharma and Greg, which ended its five-year run in 2002. In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, she plays Kate Houghton, vice president of comedy at Warner Brothers. When Kate fires Daffy Duck from his latest film, she quickly regrets it as the mistake of her career. The Warner Brothers themselves order her to bring Daffy back, which she sets out to do with Bugs Bunny in tow.
In the meantime, Daffy has attached himself to security guard and aspiring stuntman D.J. Drake, played by the versatile Fraser. Since first gaining attention as a hip caveman in the 1992 comedy Encino Man, Fraser has appeared in a number of memorable films, from The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, to the critically acclaimed Gods and Monsters alongside Sir Ian McKellen. This time, Fraser shares the screen with Daffy Duck, who follows him on an international adventure to save his father (played by Timothy Dalton), a spy posing as a film star who has been kidnapped by the nefarious chairman of the Acme Corporation (Steve Martin).
Keeping all this wackiness under control is veteran director Joe Dante, whose previous films include Gremlins, Amazon Women on the Moon and The Twilight Zone. Dante, Fraser and Elfman recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss the difficulties of mixing live action with animation and their love for the world of the Looney Tunes.
Were you a fan of the Looney Tunes films when you were a kid?
Fraser: It's funny you refer to them as films, which is very interesting because they were created for the big screen initially. They ran alongside a newsreel, and they were before a feature film, so you were right on the nose there. But I only saw them on television screens growing up, where I was in my pajamas, every Saturday morning with a bowl of cereal that probably had too much sugar in it, and was laughing my head off ... and, unbeknownst to me at the time, was probably being given an education in ... comedy, in pace, timing, rhythm, setup—it's all there.
Elfman: I don't remember the first time I saw Looney Tunes as a kid. It was just there. You're born and there it is. My brother is 10 years older and my sister is 13 years older, so they're out there doing soccer and I'm home in my playpen watching Looney Tunes. I remember the sounds. I was totally captivated because it had a rhythm that kept going and kept my attention. Even if I didn't catch all the jokes as a really young child, there was humor I did get. And I think that's what's great about Looney Tunes, it has a political humor, total silliness humor and adult jokes. Chuck Jones never really intended it to be for kids. He always intended it to be adult humor. So that's cool because it will appeal to both kids and adults.
Did you look at Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as an example of the successful mixing of live action and animation?
Fraser: That movie's a landmark, you know. It's a favorite of mine, and there are parallels to it in the way that you see the Looney Tunes in that one. But interestingly, Dean Cundey shot that, and he also shot Looney Tunes: Back in Action, so we felt like we'd had a good karma going for us there. A lot of the puppeteers, actually the two puppeteers who worked on Looney Tunes worked alongside legions of them on Roger Rabbit, because there were was so much more stuff they had to do. It was all the monofilament wire and moving things around, and now, for Looney Tunes: Back in Action, it's just about us moving an object in space that's moved around, and someone will layer by layer put in whatever.
Dante: Listen, I think I'm exhausted. I did all my stuff in one location. [director Robert Zemeckis] was flying back and forth to England to supervise the animation while they were doing the movie. And he didn't have any of the technology that I have. Everything was mechanical effects. Somebody had to get kicked, they had a mechanical thing to kick them. If they had to fly around the room they had to put him on strings, and all that stuff. And we didn't have to do any of that because we had CGI. It didn't exist then. So to make that movie, this movie was hard enough, but to make it under those circumstances, we never would have had it finished in time. We never would have made this release date. Because we knew going in that we had a year and a half and it was coming out Nov. 14, no matter what.
How did you work with the puppeteers on the set for this film?
Fraser: There's an unsung hero, and he's the man behind the curtain, and his name is Bruce Lanoil. Bruce and I met on a movie called Monkeybone and he is someone who is facile and quite a genius with his characters. He knows them all, inside and out. He's a master puppeteer. What he did was, basically, they had life-sized stand-ins or puppets that were created, and he would be there and he would rehearse with the Bugs puppet or the Daffy puppet or Tweety, or whoever was there, so that not only does the actor have a reference point to work with, but the cinematographer did, the prop guys, everyone.
Joe Dante: It's not easy for actors to act with nothing. And even though you rehearse with a puppeteer and a puppet, actually the scene that's going to be in the movie is you doing it looking at nothing, or looking at a pair of eyeballs that will be taken out later.
Elfman: What was good is that very rarely did we have green screen, which is amazing technology-wise for these people that they can mesh these worlds together so seamlessly. A lot of it was filmed like a normal movie, which is good for us because it gives us an environment that seems real because you're already having to inject your belief system into a heightened sense of unreality reality, depending on how you look at it.
How does acting with no one there affect your comedic timing?
Elfman: Comedy is rhythm, like a dance. When you have a dance partner, you're feeding them flow, resistance, touch, push. There's a certain exchange of energy between your bodies. Comedy is very much like a dance between two people. When you don't have that being offered to you, you have to be both partners. That was extraordinarily challenging and intimidating for the first couple weeks of filming.
Fraser: It seems absurd and a little bit schizophrenic to put yourself in that mind frame, to actually believe that something that isn't there is really there, but we all need to be on the same page. The timing actually was just like acting with another actor, because he worked with us to rehearse the scenes and then we were given a little electronic earpiece, a tech thing, so he would speak the dialogue into a microphone, so you really were like Joan of Arc and having voices in your ear.
How do you make it believable?
Fraser: You really have to enjoy what you're doing, I think, to make it work, and with someone like Joe Dante, who is, I believe, arguably one of the only living filmmakers now who is among the best at putting live action and animated characters on the screen together.
Jenna, this is your first time working with animated effects. Was it difficult to get used to?
Elfman: I hadn't even worked with Brendan the first two weeks, it was just me and Bugs. I was just thrown in, and it's totally a vacuum of energy with having nobody there next to you. It's so intimidating. There's special-effects people, animation people, visual-effects people. You have these whole new dynamics on the set which are not normally part of a film because I don't know how that whole process works. But as I discovered as we went into the film, you know what you are allowed to do technically that would mess up their animation process or not.
How did you overcome those initial difficulties?
Elfman: You have to find what the rhythm with the character is and where it is within you. This comedy was so broad that I sometimes asked, "Am I being too big right now?" And actually, no, because when I viewed dailies and I didn't infuse enough energy into it, it looks wrong. It looked like the actor was intimidated by the process and it didn't work. So you just have to give everything and believe in the most ridiculous scenarios, and the more you believe, the more it works.
Fraser: That's the joke about [the Looney Tunes characters], they know that they're just cartoon characters in Hollywood, and they tell their audience, "Relax, lighten up, I'm just a cartoon," and they thumb their nose at the audience at the same time. And it's funny because they deadpan it, and that's part of the whole joke. But the nuts and bolts of making the reality of a cartoon character believable onscreen is just as simple as the actor believing that it's really there, and as long as they do, then you rely on technology and [computer animation] to let the audience believe that it's there too also.
How was the production process different than working on a purely live-action film?
Dante: Basically, what I did on this movie is, I shot what became the backgrounds for the animation, and then the animation would be handed up the chain. And along the way we would do posed drawings. We would put the characters into the drawings in black-and-white still poses, and we would look at the jokes, see what they thought. If they were good, then they'd go to the voice guy. ... Once we've decide what the jokes are, we go to Joe Alaskey, who is the guy who does all the voices for [Bugs and Daffy], and he does a pass. And we look at that and we draw to it. We get the timing and everything. And everybody decides, is this the best joke? Is this the way we want to do it? Because we have the latitude to change the joke as long as it doesn't affect what the people who have already shot in the background are doing.
So sometimes that will be a series of back-and-forths that may be five, six, seven times over a period of four months. And then at a certain point it's like, OK, we want to change the joke again but we already started animating it. Now, there's definitely a cost factor here. And now I have to decide, is this joke funny enough to be worth throwing out the animation we've done and putting in new animation? Yes, no, maybe. Different points of view about that, maybe even disagreements about it, but that in a nutshell would be the kind of thing we would do a hundred times every day with every scene.
Brendan, you actually ended up doing the voice for the Tasmanian Devil. How did that happen?
Fraser: I used to get thrown out of the classroom for doing that. I was doing it one day and [animation director] Eric Goldberg was like, "Who did that?" They got me on a soundstage and he said, "Do it again." So I did. I feel like I've got uber-bragging rights now. The squeezy toy, I think, even has my [voice].
How did you decide which Looney Tunes characters to use in the film?
Dante: The characters were pretty much decided, I think, by their functions. It's mostly antagonist characters that we used, because the idea is that they work for Acme and they have different bad-guy scenes. So that's why Marvin and Sam get so much attention. But we all love Foghorn, so we had to put him in. And we tried to stick in as many of them as we could, even if it's just for one shot. But there is a treasure trove of them, I mean there was a lot. At one point there was even a thought, since Warner Brothers owns virtually every character that's ever been created for a cartoon now, of putting in some of the MGM characters or some of the Hanna-Barbera characters besides the Scooby-Doo joke. And we decided we didn't want to do that, that it was really supposed to be Looney Tunes and we didn't want to put Droopy in there or Tom and Jerry and kind of screw it up, because then, also, Roger Rabbit did that joke.
What are your favorite scenes in the movie?
Fraser: I have to say my favorite is the chase through the paintings. It's inspired and it almost ended up on the floor. It is so funny and so clever. These are the greatest hits of modern art, and here we have the greatest hits of American cartoon icons charging through them, assuming them stylistically. It's great fun to watch, it's dizzying, great fun.
Dante: I think the Louvre sequence is very good, but that's not really my sequence. I was there, but I shot background plates with nothing in them. Everything else was added by the animators. Maybe that's why it's good.
Elfman: I think the one with me and Bugs in the commissary is pretty good. I like a lot of the scenes. Let me flash back. I thought the Vegas stuff was really funny, that whole sequence.
Was there any trepidation about taking over the mantle of these classic characters?
Dante: Absolutely. I mean, I used to know Chuck Jones and I used to know Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng, and I had nothing but the greatest respect for these people. I can't pretend to be as good at doing what they do as they were. This is a little different in that it's not a cartoon, it has a little different discipline, but there was always a lot of feeling of, "What if I don't do it right? What if it isn't worthy of the good cartoons?" But that's why we all redoubled our efforts to make it so. At the very least, I mean, whatever people may think of the movie, I'm hoping they'll come out saying, "At least these people understand and like these characters and they're trying to do them in character the way they would have been if they had just stepped out of a movie in 1953."
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Charles Stross
