Jenna Elfman as Kate Houghton in Looney Tunes: Back in Action - 2003. The fate of the human race is in the hands of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, teaming up to wreak hilarious comic mayhem in a fast-paced family adventure combining live-action stars (Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin and more) with animation (a hilarious cavalcade of Looney Tunes greats).
They've now been a part of the public conscious and the world's pop-culture pulse for more than 60 years. Who hasn't grown up watching at least a few of Warner Brothers' extensive library vault of Looney Tunes cartoons? From Bugs to Daffy to Taz to Tweety and more, we've all grown to love these crazy characters. And just about every one of those characters we've ever seen makes their way into at some point.In the tradition of Anchor's Aweigh, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam, Back in Action is the latest attempt by Hollywood at large to integrate cartoon characters with the live-action world. And I must say, it is pretty seamless. The plot is a pretty crazy one, but that is only fitting when we are speaking of the Looney Tunes gang.
Bugs Bunny is all set to make a new movie and Daffy Duck is trying to convince the Warner Brothers (literally) that he is the real star, not the rabbit. Daffy ends up fired and kicked off the lot. Daffy meets a security guard named D.J. Drake who also doubles as Brendan Fraser's stunt double. He's played, of course,. Meanwhile, Jenna Elfman is Kate Houghton, a studio exec who's trying to make Bugs the star of the film.
She soon realizes that firing Daffy was a mistake and that Bugs needs Daffy and vice versa. However, by the time she goes to find Daffy he has already gone off on an adventure with Drake to rescue his legendary movie star father, Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton), who plays a secret agent James Bond-type character in the movies but is, in reality, a secret agent himself. You get the picture. Off the adventure goes. Last weekend, I got a chance to have a talk with the film's director, and its live-action stars, Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser. Actually, I even got a chance to talk via teleconference with the legendary Bugs Bunny as well.
You can find that interview on IGN later this week. For now, you'll have to settle for our interview with actual live humans.
The most difficult aspect of combining live action with animation is convincing the audience that the cartoons are really there. This means finding actors who can believe that too. The first question we asked Brendan Fraser was about the challenge of working with people that don't exist: 'It's funny that you call them people, because I agree with you,' Fraser smiles brightly. 'That's the joke about them, is that they know that they are just cartoon characters in Hollywood. They tell their audience, 'Relax! 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. The nuts and bolts of making the reality of a cartoon character believable on screen is just as simple as the actor believing that it's really there.' While Fraser had some experience dealing with non-existent characters in films like The Mummy and Monkeybone, this is a new thing for his co-star Jenna Elfman. 'It's totally hard,' Elfman says. 'And what was good was, very rarely did we have a green screen, which is amazing, technology-wise, for these people. They can mesh these two worlds 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.' Elmer+Fudd,+Bugs+Bunny,+Brendan+Fraser+and+Jenna+Elfman+in+Looney+Tunes:+Back+in+Action'It's very hard to do,' says director Joe Dante. 'It's not easy for actors to act with nothing. And even though you rehearse with a puppeteer and a puppet, the scene that's going to be in the movie is you looking at nothing or looking at a pair of eyeballs that will be taken out later. So basically, what I did in this movie, was I shot the backgrounds. And then the animation would be handed up the chain.
And along the way we would do pose drawings. We would put the characters into the drawings in black and white still poses and we would look at the jokes, see if we thought they fit. 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 we've already shot in the background are doing.' Another key aspect for working on a Looney Tunes movie is a love of the Toons themselves.
Elfman and Fraser both admit to growing up on the shorts and maybe even taking a few cues from them. '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,' Fraser muses. 'Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was probably being given an education in at least what I think I know about comedy, in pace timing, rhythm, set-up.
It's all there. Also, in music and orchestrations and arrangements.' ' Looney Tunes is brilliant at timing,' Elfman says. 'I don't even remember the first time I started watching Looney Tunes as a kid. I just know it was there. And my brother's ten years old and my sister's thirteen years old so they're off doing soccer and I was kind of at home in my playpen watching Looney Tunes.
I remember the sounds. And I was totally captivated. It had a rhythm, it kept going, it kept my attention but it was funny. And even if I didn't get 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 is it has a heightened.
There's a political humor to them, there's a total silliness humor which is good for kids, but there's adult jokes. Chuck Jones never made it to be for kids actually. He always intended it to be adult humor.'
This live action/animated feature begins when Daffy Duck – jealous of Bugs Bunny's high-profile career - is let go by the studio after he demands more money and attention. But Daffy soon gets caught up in a plot involving the kidnapping of secret agent Damien Drake (played by Timothy Dalton) by the evil chairman of the Acme Corporation (Steve Martin). With help from the Drake's son (Brendan Fraser), Daffy embarks on a mission to rescue the kidnapped spy. Meanwhile, Bugs and a Warner Brothers executive (Jenna Elfman) decide that Daffy is an integral part of the Looney Tunes gang. The subversive spirit of the Looney Tunes is in good hands in LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION. Director Joe Dante is clearly a fan and he keeps the jokes coming.
There are movie parodies ( Psycho, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), throwaway gags, and lots of all-out mayhem, especially a wildly surreal romp through the paintings at the Louvre. And though Wile E. Coyote is now ordering online from Acme.com, the goodies are just as outrageous and subject to Murphy's Law as ever.Live-action performers Brendan Fraser, Timothy Dalton, Steve Martin, and Joan Cusack, all have fun, but they can't steal the movie from Bugs, Daffy, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweetie Pie, Marvin Martian, the Tasmanian Devil, Pepe LePew, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, and of course Mr.