Carrotblanca

The first thing I noticed in this Looney Tunes takeoff on "Casablanca" is the fantastic artwork. Man, this looks beautiful! The second thing quickly apparent is that this cartoon is going to include a ton of Looney Tunes characters, all congregating in the "Cafe Au Lait Americain" establishment in "Carrotblanca."

With Bugs Bunny playing Humphrey Bogart; Daffy Duck as Sam the piano man, Tweety as Peter Lorre, Yosemite Sam as a Nazi general, etc., this is a hoot - really fun to watch. Of course, the more you know the movie Casablanca, the more you'll laugh at this.

However, to be honest, I didn't find it hilarious, just mildly amusing and, of course, clever. With only seven or so minutes to work with, they had to rush the story so the ending is a bit goofy...but, hey, it's a cartoon, and they're supposed to provide us the unexpected!

In an inspired decision, this cartoon was included on the new two-disc special edition of Casablance that was released in August 2003. It's worth more than just one look as many of your old favorites - Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn and others - stop by for cameos or larger roles. I thought the best casting was Pepe LePew in the Claude Rains role, though Tweety's Peter Lorre impression is priceless. (These are two characters, incidentally, whom I usually have little use for.) A very worthy successor to the great Warner Bros. cartoons of the 40s and 50s, and a great homage to one of the greatest movies ever made.

This short is welcome and enjoyable for many reasons and on many levels. It's a good spoof of Casablanca, it's as hilarious as the best of the work Warner Brothers did in their heyday and half the fun is in spotting the characters in small roles or as extras (waiters, sitting at tables, etc.), as with The Scarlet Pumpernickel or the glorious Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which used the same concept. Excellent short of recent vintage which maintains the spirit of the old shorts. Glad to see that it's available. Well worth watching. Most recommended.

This cartoon spoofs Casablanca wonderfully, and reuses the Scarlet Pumpernickel's formula for putting various stars in unlikely roles. Tweety is weird but funny as Usmarte and does an excellent Peter Lorre impression. The animation is of the new, plastic sort. But if you consider the animation of other cartoons these days, the weird digital sheen loses importance. Bugs apparently likes Penelope, which is strange, I must say. CAT and RABBIT?!!? Anyway, it's a cartoon, and such cartoons like The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950) quite disregard the species. Funny and filled with laughs, with more of the dramatic story sense than most. Highly recommended.

In Casablanca, Bugs Bunny runs an American bar and only looks out for himself. When he is given secret papers that will help defeat the rule of General Pandemonium. However when Bugs falls for Kitty, the wife of the leader of resistance, things change for him and he finds himself having to put himself on the line.

I have nothing against the updated Loony Tunes cartoons, but I do have something against cartoons that are unfunny, poorly developed and simply weak. Here the idea of a spoof on the film Casablanca sounds like it could be OK but it is a terrible, horrid mess. The plot copies the plot of Casablanca in a very condensed form but does nothing of merit with it. With so many little details to add in, the plot never stops long enough to be funny.

This is made worse by the sheer volume of characters crammed in with nothing to do. Only Tweety's impression of Peter Lorre is funny - but even that had been done better by a Loony Tunes character that used to be Lorre. None of the rest of the characters really work - their voice work is poor at best, horrid at worst. They rush past the screen with so little time that they never make an impression - it's like the film is expecting the recognition of characters to be enough to replace laughs or fun.

With barely a single laugh to it, a plot that is an uninspired mess and characters who don't sound like themselves or act like themselves this cartoon is about a bad a film from Loony Tunes as I have seen. It's not the fact that it is a modern cartoon that bothers me - it's the fact that it is a sh*t cartoon. Avoid this like the plague.