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Warner Bros.’ ‘Looney Tunes Cartoons’ to be featured at 2019 Annecy Festival

12/03/2019
AnimationXpress Team

Bugs, Daffy, Porky and the lot are beaming off to the French-Swiss border where they will open the 2019 Annecy Intl. Animation Film Festival, in what the festival has announced as the world premiere of new episodes of the rebooted franchise titled Looney Tunes Cartoons.

They will screen ahead of the previously announced opening film Playmobil: The Movie. Last year’s Works in Progress presentation by Warner Animation Group and Warner Bros. Animation at Annecy was among the best received in recent past. For a few brief minutes, the audience of industry pros, animation students and press were reminiscing Saturday mornings spent on the living room floor eating dry cereal out of the box in their pyjamas.

The clip featured was a spoof on the Indiana Jones-type tomb-caper and shown in animatics. The Curse of the Monkey Bird featured Daffy Duck and Porky Pig wading into a jungle temple, in search of its cursed treasure. The Annecy audience ate up in particular one inspired sequence where, thanks to Daffy’s ineptitude, Porky was, in rapid succession: Shot by paralyzing arrows, punched by a giant boxing glove, crushed by a mace, blown up and made victim to a trap floor, plunging to a subterranean level – where Daffy, unscathed, joins him.

The new cartoons will be 1-6 minutes in length, with WBA producing 1,000 minutes in all. The content will be multi-platform oriented, including digital, mobile and traditional broadcast. The series features veteran “Looney Tunes” voice cast members including Jeff Bergman and Bob Bergen, and newcomer Eric Bauza taking the reins as Bugs.

“I wanted to go back to the ‘40s ‘Looney Tunes,’ late ‘30s, early ‘40s,” said executive producer Peter Browngardt, displaying character designs from different artists for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among others. “Super irreverent, super bananas, high energy. They pushed the surrealism, the high physicality of the animation, the expressions in the animation.”

Besides opening the festival, Looney Tunes Cartoons shorts will also participate in Annecy’s popular open-air screenings on Monday 10 June, proffering the general public a chance for a first look at the revamped classic.