Warner Brothers Animation has just announced plans for a brand new series of Looney Tunes shorts, coming next year! The new series, to be title Looney Tunes Cartoons, will be different from both of the previous incarnations of these characters, The Looney Tunes Show, and Wabbit, or New Looney Tunes, as it was called in its second season.
Warner Brother made this announcement on Monday at the Annecy Film Festival, where they screened one of the upcoming shorts, The Curse of the Monkey Bird, an imaginative spoof of an Indiana Jones style adventure, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. According to Variety, this new short was met with thunderous applause.
The studio said that the production values of Looney Tunes Cartoons will be as high as they were back in the days of the original Looney Tunes theatrical shorts, and the show will use the same processes that the original shorts did as well. They say that this focus on the art, and the control given to the cartoonists will let their let each artist’s personality and style come through in every cartoon.
This new series will give full control over the shorts to the animators, and it will not follow a traditional ‘season’ structure, instead the first season will consist of 1,000 minutes of animation, and the artists will determine the lengths. Variety is reporting that there will be 50 shorts, these will vary in length from one to six minutes, and each one will be written and drawn by the cartoonists.
“I wanted to go back to the ‘40s ‘Looney Tunes,’ late ‘30s, early ‘40s, super irreverent, super bananas, high energy. They pushed the surrealism, the high physicality of the animation, the expressions in the animation,” said executive producer Peter Browngardt.
This cartoonist-driven method of animation will mean that the style and designs of the characters and setting will vary widely depending on the artists working on each cartoon. Browngardt also said that all episodes will be in classical 2D animation, which sparked another large round of applause from the audience.
“The Looney Tunes are one of the most beloved group of animated characters in the world” said Sam Register, president of Warner Bros. Animation. “Looney Tunes Cartoons places these characters into the hands of some of the best artists in the business and into an animated shorts format that will remind many of the time when they first fell in love with Bugs, Daffy, Porky and the rest of the gang.”
Looney Tunes Cartoons will not be exclusively a television show either, as Warner Brothers has said that the shorts will debut on a variety of platforms, including digital, mobile, and broadcast. The show will feature cast members from several previous Looney Tunes projects such as Jeff Bergman and Bob Bergen, as well as Eric Bauza. Sam Register (Teen Titans Go!) and Peter Browngardt (Uncle Grandpa) will executive produce.
