Out in the Albuquerque desert, John Cena has a cartoon canary clenched in his fist — and he’s delivering fluent baby talk with a completely straight face.
It’s the biggest laugh in Coyote vs. ACME, and the only reason it exists is that somebody came down ill.
Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for Coyote vs. ACME.
That canary was never innocent
Of everyone on the Looney Tunes bench, Tweety Bird reads as the most adorable and harmless, and years of newer cartoons have played up that interpretation to grating effect. The character’s earliest shorts tell a different story.
Revisit Tweety’s debut. Far from a helpless target being hounded around by Sylvester the Cat, the tiny canary relishes the pursuit — he takes pleasure in luring Sylvester in, then engineers his downfall.
“Tweety’s sadistic,” screenwriter Samy Burch said.
Hence the film casting him as a villain: a pint-sized enforcer working for the ACME Corporation and lined up against the heroes. Audiences turning up for a cute little bird may be caught off guard. The creative team never had second thoughts.
“Even in the first pitch I did, this idea of him being a heavy felt funny,” Burch said.
“I don’t pay you to tink you taw”
Turning Tweety into hired muscle puts him on the payroll of ACME chief counsel Buddy Crane, Cena’s character. The scene the two share is the wildest stretch in the picture.
When Tweety comes up short in his attempt to apprehend the Road Runner, Cena heads out to the desert to issue a threat in person. The bird launches into an explanation of how the escape happened, opening with his trademark “I tawt I taw.” Cena interrupts using the bird’s own dialect: “You tawt you taw? I don’t pay you to tink you taw I pay you to taw!”
Every remaining line of the exchange is delivered in Tweety-speak.
Eric Bauza, the voice behind most of the movie’s Looney Tunes characters, nails a petrified Tweety. Still, it’s Cena who makes the bit land, navigating the whole ridiculous back-and-forth without breaking into a grin or dialing down his menace by a degree.
How a sick day reshaped the film
None of it was planned.
“It’s funny, that scene came together as a total surprise,” said director Dave Green. “Maybe, like, one week into photography, Will [Forte] had gotten sick and we needed to quickly rearrange the schedule and change locations. I think a version of that scene originally took place in John’s office, or maybe at the steakhouse, with John and Tweety facing off against each other while John is eating a steak. But those different iterations had to go out the window and we had to do a story patch because of our schedule change. Everyone put their heads together and it resulted in one of my favorite scenes in the movie. We shot it against the same backdrop where, I’m sure, they’ve shot tons of standoffs in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, in the middle of the Albuquerque desert.”
Green had praise for his star, too: “John nailed it right away, just absolutely deadpan. He gave us so many great versions of anger and temperature. It was a blast to shoot that scene. It’s completely absurd.”
A movie that finally gets these characters
As someone who has logged serious hours with these cartoons, what stood out most to me about Coyote vs. ACME is how well it knows the Warner Bros. roster. You’d think that would be table stakes. It has been treated as optional before, which explains why most previous theatrical Looney Tunes outings have been sub-par.
Consider Daffy Duck. He’s more than the bitter duck who resents Bugs Bunny. That reading took hold in the late 1940s, particularly in shorts directed by Chuck Jones. Daffy’s earlier appearances, the ones Bob Clampett directed, had him living up to his name as an uncontainable troublemaker.
Green and Burch reach for the Clampett Daffy, even though angry Daffy has been the dominant version for more than 70 years. It’s the same instinct that produced the villain Tweety.
Cena has demonstrated his comedic chops across a wide number of comedies, but watching him inhabit Tweety’s speech patterns while a cartoon bird gets squished in his meaty fist suggests there’s nothing the guy can’t do. Give us the Tweety and Buddy Crane spin-off next.
Coyote vs. ACME arrives in theaters on Aug. 28.