Like many people my age or older, I grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. One of the great things about them was that since many of them were made as shorts that were shown before theatrical movies, and therefore had to please both children and adults, they were multi-layered with jokes that worked whether you were a child, a teenager, or a grown-up. One of the other great things about them was that they evoked a sense of old Hollywood, back when the studio was king. In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, director Joe Dante, a talented cast of human actors, and animators have managed to recapture the magic of those old cartoons providing entertainment for a new generation of children and nostalgia for those no longer children.
Combining animation and live action, a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the movie tells the story of the search for the Blue Monkey, a magical diamond that can turn people into monkeys. Bugs and Daffy join forces with Warner Brothers security guard and would-be stuntman D.J. Drake (Fraser) and studio executive Kate Houghton (Elfman) in an effort to track down the diamond before the Chairman of the Acme corporation (Martin) can find it and use the gem to turn the whole world into monkey slaves who will work in his factories (before turning them back into humans so that they can buy his products). Adding to the good guys' motivation to find the diamond is the fact that the Chairman has kidnapped DJ's father, Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton), the celebrated British Actor of a series of spy movies, and one of the studio's biggest stars.
Their quest takes them around the world, from the Warner Brothers' commissary, where many famous Warner Brothers' players turn up, to Yosemite Sam's Wooden Nickel casino in Las Vegas, into the mysterious Area 52 (for which Area 51 is only a cover), through the Louvre in Paris in an imaginative and well animated scene wherein Bugs and Daffy take on the style of drawing of the various paintings they run through, and then on to deepest Africa, before finally climaxing in outer space.
The laughs come flying at you along the way, and while many are aimed at children, more time seems to have been spent on the jokes aimed at grown-ups. At one point Bugs is surprised in the shower by Elfman's character, and what follows is a hilarious Psycho spoof that probably won't register with children at all. Area 52 is filled with B-monsters from 1950s sci-fi movies (Robbie the Robot, Daleks, etc.), which again children probably won't recognize. Children, or the inattentive, also might miss the many signs, posters, and background gags that abound in this film. (Try to read all the movie posters you see in the background!)
While Bugs and Daffy get all the funniest jokes, Fraser manages to hold his own and plays convincingly against the animated characters. Elfman is fine as well, but doesn't quite throw herself into the movie as much as Fraser. Martin's Chairman is completely over-the-top and never quite works. God knows where he found that accent! And Dalton, playing himself and spoofing his old Bond days, does well as DJ's father.
Not having children myself, I can't really tell you how children will react to this movie (I'll leave that to my brother Eric and his two sons), but I can tell you that as an aging Gen-Xer, this movie brought back memories and laughs from my own childhood.
