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The Day the Earth Blew Up Movie Review

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is a 2025 animated science fiction comedy film directed by Pete Browngardt and starring Eric Bauza. It’s such a disappointing flick.

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“Do you have any idea how hard it is for male ducks to lay eggs?“

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Porky Pig and Daffy Duck become Earth’s only hope when their antics at the local bubble-gum factory uncover a secret alien mind-control plot. Faced with cosmic odds, they must save their town and the world while not driving each other totally crazy. This movie was made by Warner Bros. initially, but then they abandoned it and thankfully it was released by another studio. It got superb reviews, but I was personally let down by it.

This is the first fully animated feature-length Looney Tunes film. As a big fan of this entire franchise, I was looking forward to seeing this one. But the final product is quite weak. It has phenomenal voice acting work from the very talented Eric Bauza. Both Porky and Daffy sound as they should sound. The animation is traditional in the best way possible and the score is also quite classical.

So what is the problem then? Well, this is the textbook example of how it’s very difficult to capture the same sort of magic that defined a series in its golden era. You can have the voices intact and you can have the designs be faithful, but you are missing the special sauce that made those cartoons so iconic to this day. You are missing the humor and the energy above all else.

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First off, the characterization is all wrong. Porky having a love interest and being obsessed with her did not sit right with me. Petunia is pretty sympathetic for sure, but too much time was devoted to their uninteresting romance. Porky also does not stutter nearly enough as he should. He also felt a bit too sure of himself.

Daffy was even more strange. This film tried to bring back the older Daffy that was more manic and insane than the one that was greedy and selfish, but they failed to do that because he was never as energetic or as mad as he should have been. Daffy wanting to work so badly was also not true to his character and the relationship between the two was overly friendly. Some of their moments were sweet, but some were also overly corny.

The Day the Earth Blew Up only has these two iconic Looney Tunes characters. Not a single additional character was present, which is absolutely ridiculous as their roster is simply huge. Yo can do so much with these characters and they did so little. Instead, they introduced humans into the mix and nobody likes to see them in such a cartoon. Farmer Jim was pointless and they failed to make their connection with him meaningful. As for The Invader, he was over-the-top for sure, but simply not fun enough.

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The sci-fi elements were fine for what they are, which is silly entertainment for the kids. I loved the bubblegum aesthetic to the extraterrestrials and the movie is surely colorful and gorgeous to watch. The designs of the characters are excellent and the background work is also solid. The score is mostly lovely with a few overly modern additions. The plot was pretty solid for this type of film and I liked the aliens quite a bit, but the dialogue was pedestrian and the humor pretty much non-existent. I did not laugh once during the entire runtime, which was a huge problem for what was supposed to be an irreverent comedy. And there is also an issue of this particular IP being a problematic fit for a feature film format, leading to a lot of padding.