Long-awaited, fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie will receive an awards-qualifying run before the end of 2024, ahead of its official theatrical release on February 28th, 2025. I’ve screened the film and spoke with director Peter Browngardt about this sci-fi action comedy starring beloved characters who are true to themselves and presented in ways you’ve never seen before. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: How does it feel having Ketchup Entertainment release this on Feb. 28 and for an awards qualifying run before the end of the year?

Peter Browngardt: Very very happy. Very excited. Fortunate the film is coming out. Very exciting for not only myself but also the whole crew. We’ve worked really hard for many years making the film. And it’s just going to be really cool to go to a movie theater and see all our hard work up on the big screen.

JM: Oh, so well deserved. It’s lovely hand drawn animation. It’s vivacious. It’s energetic. And what really goes into structuring a feature with the Looney Tunes characters, as opposed to the shorts that you’ve been a part of through the “Looney Tunes Cartoons” and the shorts that we’ve loved for decades and decades?

PB: So I had the experience of making 209 new Looney Tunes shorts for Max and we had a great crew. It was kind of like a graduate school of making cartoons. We learned and dived in and learned about these characters. But then when I got approached about pitching something of a feature film to the studio, I knew that in order to tell a story — a Looney Tunes movie — it couldn’t just be 90 minutes of just jokes and gags. It had to have an emotional story. It had to have an emotional core. Porky and Daffy as the leads of the film jumped out early on because they’re kind of the only Looney Tunes characters that don’t want to kill each other. For the most part when they’re buddies in the early Looney Tunes, they’re not trying to eat or kill each other.

And also they were stars in a lot of genre cartoons. They play a lot of roles and I knew that I wanted to do a genre film. I loved old sci-fi forties, fifties, sixties films. So I knew I had to use them and I knew that we had to explore the relationship and the nuts and bolts of it — to take the audience on a journey of the ups and downs of living together and being best friends. We had to dig into who they are and how they feel about each other.

JM: And they’re homeowners, and there’s so much fun you have with them being homeowners!

PB: Yes, it’s a little bit of an origin story of how they ended up. We wanted to reintroduce them in a way… the great thing about Looney Tunes is… I was like, “How are we really going to [show] where Porky and Daffy come from?” And I thought, “Well, [in] every cartoon they came from somewhere else. They’re either working a different job, or a different scenario.” They could play all these parts. They’re kind of these great character actors in a way, [from] back in the day. I didn’t take it like I’m redefining the history of Looney Tunes by telling them that they lived on a farm and all this stuff. No, it’s just, it’s funny. It works for the story and we’re gonna go for it.

JM: And was it a risk to, in one of the sequences of the movie, which is hilarious, have them do all these jobs and get fired from all these jobs? It is a short within the feature. Was it a risk for you to put basically a short within the feature?

PB: One of my first ideas was to do that. I thought it would be such a cool idea to sort of possibly break aspect ratio. The movie is in CinemaScope. All classic, great sci-fi films, in my opinion, are in CinemaScope. And then we went to 4:3. I thought it’d be cool as an homage to the classic shorts, put the short within the [movie]. And I love “[Who Framed] Roger Rabbit” — a big movie for me growing up. They start that film in a short and then sort of break it out.

JM: Daffy and Porky and Petunia Pig. It’s a great trio because you get their personalities, you get their dynamics, and they’re dealing with something crazy like gum that gets outta control.

PB: Gum is funny. Bubblegum is funny. You can do a lot of stuff with gum.

JM: Now it’s you and a total of 11 writers on this movie. Did I read that right in the opening credits?

PB: You’re right, you’re right, yeah. And it’s not like we had 11 drafts or versions of the script. The reason is because I believe, as an artist and a filmmaker and an animator, that… the writing of the animation is made in the storyboard process. Storyboarding is about reboarding. You’re exploring. We worked with the screenwriter, Kevin Costello, to write the first draft of the script. And it gave us a great structure. But things change, things evolve, and I had a great core group of 10 board artists, maybe more, we fluctuated. We wrote the dialogue. We rewrote sequences. Writing is not only with words, but it’s with pictures. A picture speaks a thousand words, right? So, if you come up with a good picture, it could trigger a whole writing of a whole new idea or a whole new sequence. So Warner Bros., hats off to them, it’s not a common practice, actually allowed us to credit all the board artists as writers as well.

JM: That’s fantastic. That’s excellent. When you were growing up, besides the Looney Tunes, what inspired you as far as science fiction, slapstick and zaniness? This film delivers when it comes to all of that. How did you take what you learned and saw from your childhood and put that into “The Day the Earth Blew Up”?

PB: I grew up on Looney Tunes, but also a lot of different forms of animation. I love Tex Avery cartoons from the MGM studio. “Roger Rabbit” was a big one like I mentioned. Pee-Wee Herman. Gary Larson was a really big influence. Mad Magazine specifically was really big. “[Monty] Python”. Early “SNL”. I love ’90s “SNL”. Phil Hartman. Chris Farley. I love farce comedy. “The Jerk”. “Dumb and Dumber”. I really like extreme characters doing ridiculous things and telling a story with them. I always knew I wanted to do animation, but anything that has sort of that vibe to it attracts me. I love punk music and a little anti-authoritativeness to characters to sort of take on the norms of society a little bit.

JM: You get [such] energy… from Eric Bauza. He’s Daffy and Porky, and they have so much back and forth. He has so much back and forth with himself. How amazed have you been at what your lead voice actor has been able to do for your movie?

PB: Eric is a one of a kind talent and human being. Great guy. I love his version of the Looney Tunes. I think it’s up there… the closest to Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc, of course, is the greatest. But yeah, Eric blew me away. I knew I had my Porky and Daffy when we were writing the film. I knew Eric could do it, but when we were doing the recording sessions, I would pitch the storyboard to him, walk him through the sequences, and he would do each character individually. So he’d do a pass of just Porky. He always started with Porky first. He said it was a little bit easier on his voice. And then he would do a pass with Daffy.

But what was amazing about it is when he did the [Daffy] pass, he remembered what he did for Porky. And on the fly, when he was doing all the lines for Daffy… the conversation would work when we cut it together. Once we got to the editing room, we sliced all the lines, we shuffled them together to where they’re supposed to be. And it always seemed to work. And I was just like, “Man, that guy’s got it all is in his head.” And it’s always like three takes and he nails it. He’s so great — and a huge fan of animation and Looney Tunes in general. Such a talent. So fortunate that he’s out there doing it and we were able to bring him in and have him be part of this film.