Coyote vs. Acme: Toon courtroom drama is one of the smartest critiques of US politics in years

Ketchup Entertainment come out swinging with Coyote vs. Acme, a genre-bending blend of animation and live-action film that is one of the smartest critiques of US politics in years. Ostensibly a family movie, Samy Burch’s screenplay also nods to the buddy movie, the courtroom drama and the 1970s conspiracy thriller, as long-suffering Wile E. Coyote teams up with down-and-out billboard attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to take on the Acme Corporation, represented by John Cena’s slick, veiny lawyer, sporting a ridiculous bolo tie. In this universe, Acme is a massive conglomerate, which produces not only misfiring rocket boots and grenades, but almost everything that a living heart could wish for. Curiously, though, the products designed for humans seem to work much better than those available to their cartoon counterparts. And someone seems very keen for the case not to reach court, dispatching animated anvils and pianos that would have very real consequences for their human targets.

The obvious comparison is Robert Zemeckis’s 1998 neo-noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which starred Bob Hoskins as a grizzled detective investigating a murder in Toontown and infamously introduced the world to sexy toon Jessica Rabbit. A somewhat sinister opening flashback starring an animated Peter Lorre notwithstanding, Coyote vs. Acme is on its surface a much lighter, more playful film, its action set to the gentle thrum of boinging noses and plinking, blinking eyes. Anyone who was thrilled and traumatised by Zemeckis’s film as a small child will recall that his toon characters were mortal beings, susceptible to being erased by a corrosive fluid known as “the dip”. Here, there is no such threat to the cartoon characters’ lives. Indeed, there’s a lovely but rather sad sequence in which Coyote demonstrates the relentlessness of his plight to Avery by plummeting time and again into a vertiginous chasm, only to reappear at the top seconds later.

In three wordless minutes, that is, Coyote makes the dreadful existential point that took Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025) nearly three overwrought hours: who wants to live forever, endlessly pushing the boulder up the hill? More to the point, what does Coyote want? As Avery tells him, he could buy 50 birds with the settlement Acme offers. Why keep feeding their coffers in pursuit of this particular one? Coyote is a “high usage user” of Acme’s products, “addicted” to them. The perfect patsy in a system in which, to paraphrase the journalist Marina Hyde, we are not only working for billionaires but paying to do it.

If Coyote vs. Acme is in small part about our complicity in our dehumanisation at the hands of capitalism, it is also a film about contemporary America. The casting of Foghorn Leghorn – originally based on a radio comedy character, the fictional secessionist Senator Beauregard Claghorn – as Acme’s red-necked, puff-chested CEO is almost too on-the nose: his fragmented syntax, solecisms and clichés echoing the speech patterns of a certain US president. (Its head of PR is a blithering, incoherent Tasmanian Devil.)

The pitting of Forte’s provincial Albuquerque everyman against Acme’s corporate juggernaut, meanwhile, is pointedly Capra-esque. Forte is one of the most underrated actors working today. Here, sweaty, stubbly and hang-dog, beaten down by his life, he is a modern-day Jimmy Stewart, restored (perhaps) to the world by his oddball friendship with Coyote and the Pollyanna-ish optimism of his perky niece, played charmingly by Lana Condor. His single-storey office, made of wood and leather, blends into the dusty desert backdrop, in stark contrast to Acme’s steel and glass corporate HQ. In the courtroom he stutters and bumps into things. At one point he goes to Washington, to stand before the Senate much like Stewart’s Mr Smith. There’s even a scene in which Avery tears down a blanket hanging between the twin beds in the motel room he’s sharing with Coyote that directly references It Happened One Night (1934). It’s a blink-and-you’ll miss it gag in a film so packed with in-jokes that it’s impossible to grasp its full wit based on one screening alone (my particular favourite was a tongue-in-cheek nod to changing sexual and social mores, whereby Pepé le Pew becomes a test subject for pepper spray).

It’s a warm and witty and weirdly moving film, with a profoundly important seam of political satire running through it. Audiences should be grateful to Ketchup for rescuing it from obscurity after it was shelved in 2023 by Warner Bros Discovery, allegedly as a tax-write off, and only offered to tender for distribution after a public backlash. It’s a nice story: the people and the independent taking on the big boys to save the day, and one that’s mirrored in the film’s final twist. And yet a matched pair of framing devices undercuts the film’s own optimism: the use of The Clash’s ‘I Fought the Law’ over the closing credits, and an opening title announces Ketchup as a subsidiary of – you guessed it – The Acme Corporation.

► Coyote vs. Acme is in UK cinemas 21 August.