After working on many Looney Tunes shorts, director Peter Browngardt decided to take on the challenge of bringing the characters into a feature length film with The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Although he has experience with the characters at this point, Browngardt still says the animation style is one of the trickiest to get right, and even harder to teach to new animators.

The film follows Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, as the pair become Earth’s only hope when faced with the threat of an alien invasion. In traditional Looney Tunes fashion, the story takes comedic twists and turns, from trying to raise money to repair a roof to battling gum zombies, though the longer form storytelling presented the opportunity for character growth in a world where characters never really change from story to story.

DEADLINE: It’s interesting watching a longer form version of Looney Tunes, since they never really need to learn a lesson in the shorts. There never needs to be any kind of growth in a short, but in a film, there has to be some kind of story to it.

PETER BROWNGARDT: It won’t engage people otherwise, it just won’t. Shorts are awesome. I’m a huge fan of not only the classic shorts, but all short form comedy. I think comedy works great in short form. I think there’s a lot of ways to experiment in short form, more than you could in the long form, but yeah, you had to have more for an audience to hang on to or to attach themselves to and want to see what happens. But it’s scary too. 

The classic Hollywood-storytelling thing is that a character changes and it’s a new person and now they’re happy and they’ve worked all their problems out, and they’ve overcome the sort of “hero’s journey” … but that’s not how Looney Tunes works. They’re kind of like these whirlwinds of characters that affect other people in a lot of ways. So that’s one angle, but then since we were doing Porky and Daffy as a duo, basically like brothers that live together, you have to play that sort of relationship. I felt that was the best way to take a stab at it, and the most obvious and easiest in for the audience to grasp on relatably.

DEADLINE: I’ve spoken with you about the animation style of this film before, since there are so many different styles throughout, but I remember you saying the traditional “Looney Tunes style” was actually the most difficult to master. What would you say defines that style?

BROWNGARDT: Great character animation. It doesn’t have to always be the slickest animation where it’s beautiful, Disney-fluid animation. We have a lot of that in there, but it has to just pour with personality, character, acting and funny drawings… tons of funny drawings. There’s always a funny result drawing when something bad happens to the character or something silly happens. Finding artists that still have the right skillset and the right studios to work with to produce that is very challenging. Those crews of directors, artists and animators that made the original shorts had four decades to master it and refine it to a peak.

For us, it’s finding the talent, people that can actually draw the characters, because they’re not easy characters to draw. They aren’t the modern style of animation anymore, and the current artistic workforce that’s out there, everyone has been raised on those classic principles of cartooning and draftsmanship and comedy… so it was a lot of self-educating for myself and our own crew, but also anyone getting involved and even educating the studio.

DEADLINE: I would think most animators are focusing on CG when they start learning.

BROWNGARDT: There’s also a lot of anime influence, which is wonderful, but that’s just a whole different thing. Those artists back then, that was the golden era of that art form, the ’40s and ’50s, and there were no Art of Moana books to look at. They looked at film, they looked at vaudeville, they looked at entertainers, but most of all, they all had more traditional fine arts training. At that time, there was no photo illustration, so illustrator work was huge for people and you had insane draftsmen and artists. It almost felt like, ‘I want to be a fine artist or I want to have my own illustration career, but I’ll take a job in animation.’ You were getting these people that were just incredible artists in their own right, and they were just working in animation to get a paycheck, and some of them ended up loving it and turning it into their whole life.

I think it’s different now. I always tell people who are trying to get into this stuff to draw from the world around you, and the life you live and nature and people, and don’t look at other animation. It’s important to learn how to do this stuff, learn traditional art training, life drawing, all that stuff. But also, how do you see the world? How can you caricature the world? How can you tell a story through your own lens of the world? This is a special animal for the Looney Tunes, in that you have to look at the old stuff and it’s important to study all that animation, but you need to be broader in your own sense of the world.