From Coyote vs Acme to Roger Rabbit, The 8 Best Live-Action-Animation Movies of All Time
There are a few reasons why Coyote vs. Acme is one of the most interesting releases of the year, the most obvious being that it's utilising one of the oldest and now rarest tricks in the book — mixing live-action cinema with 2D animation — and doing it with characters from the Looney Tunes vault.
This particular strain of movie magic dates all the way back to the early days of Hollywood, when artists would painstakingly animate one frame at a time and lay them over a film that had already been shot to create the effect of the actors and animations interacting on screen. As you’ll see below, the style then had its first mini renaissance after the success of Mary Poppins in the 1960s and another in the 1990s after Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Inspired by a satirical New Yorker article written by Ian Frazier and adapted for the screen by James Gunn and Samy Burch (an Oscar nominee for May December), Coyote vs. Acme is a razor sharp courtroom drama comedy in which Wile E. Coyote attempts to sue the Acme Corporation for selling him so many faulty products over the years — a premise that's only slightly more ridiculous than the very real story of how this movie almost didn't see the light of day when Warner Bros. shelved the finished product indefinitely.
It currently holds a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is very much worth seeing in a theatre — if you already have, however, and are looking for more movies to scratch that live action/animated itch, you’ll find eight gems in the list below.
Far more than just a landmark in animation, the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is within its rights to be considered a great neo noir. The first film to feature classic characters from both Disney and Looney Tunes, this eye-popping visual achievement is also riveting crime yarn and it still looks absolutely phenomenal today.
This was also the movie that Robert Zemeckis decided to direct between Back to the Future Part I and Part II, which might give you some idea of the levels of old school entertainment on offer. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1947, in a world where humans and cartoon co-exist, and in which a private investigator (Bob Hoskins) reluctantly agrees to help a rabbit who’s been wrongfully accused of murder.
If you like Chinatown or Zootopia (or preferably both), you are going to be into it.
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Pre-Coyote vs. Acme, the best recent movie to blend live-action and 2D animation was the hilarious 2022 streaming hit Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers — a movie that, if you remember it for anything, you probably remember for that incredible Sonic the Hedgehog bit.
The movie essentially updates the meta-cartoon world of Roger Rabbit for 21st century Hollywood, with great jokes about bootlegging, CGI surgery, and the eeriness of uncanny valley animations like The Polar Express.
John Mulaney and Andy Samberg lead a fantastic voice cast in a movie directed by the latter's Lonely Island bandmate, Akiva Schaffer. Trust us, it’s a really good time.
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Does Space Jam need an introduction?
This movie will have its 30th anniversary next year but like all of the other titles on this list, more or less, it’s aged incredibly well. Granted, ‘90s names like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan might not pop off the way they used to, but getting to see the likes of Bill Murray cracking jokes with Bugs Bunny is still more than worth the entry.
For those reasons and various others (including that still iconic Web 1.0 website) — although, the less said about the Lebron-starring sequel from 2021 perhaps the better — Space Jam still manages to hang in the cultural ether. Long may it last.
If you’ve seen one film in your life that mixes live-action and animation, it’s probably the 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins — a movie that, thanks to an all-timer Julie Andrews performance, continues to stand the test of time.
The movie mixes lots of different styles for its musical numbers, including a near-psychedelic journey into animation for 'Jolly Holiday', during which Mary and Bert (Dick Van Dyke) hop into a chalk painting, sing along with some farm animals, and ride some turtles down a stream. It's never not delightful.
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In terms of mixing animation and live-action, there haven’t been too many experiments in the genre that you would say were specifically made with mature audiences in mind — although some recent Black Noir-focused episodes of The Boys certainly stand out.
In terms of movies, the strangest is probably still Cool World, an experimental noir movie from the 1990s in which a comic book artist played by Brad Pitt gets pulled into the story he created by a cartoon called Holli Would (oh boy) who looks a little like Marilyn Monroe.
The movie was directed by Ralph Bakshi, a cartoonist long associated with the great Robert Crumb — which should give you some idea of the tone.
The problem with live-action/animated movies in the years before CGI was how labour-intensive they were to produce. At the time of their release, both Space Jam and Roger Rabbit were up there with the most expensive movies ever made, but both of them went on to make hefty profits at the box-office.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Looney Tunes: Back in Action — a Brendan Fraser starring caper from 2003 that basically got wiped out by Elf at the box-office and kind of stopped Hollywood from making these kinds of movies for two decades.
If you’re a fan of the genre, however, Back in Action has aged better than you might think, with a story that basically does for spy movies what Roger Rabbit did for film noir — there’s even an ex-James Bond in it.
In the early 1970s, Disney continued to play around with some of the methods that they’d invented for Mary Poppins. One of those projects was the 1977 movie Pete’s Dragon — a movie that got the live-action treatment in 2016 thanks to director David Lowery.
The original is still a family gem, though: a classic story set in the early 1900s about a young boy who makes friends with a dragon named Elliot who has the power to turn invisible whenever he likes.
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The third most beloved movie from that golden age of Disney’s live-action/animation hybrids is Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a magical story about three orphans who leave London during the Blitz and go and live with a benevolent witch.
With the UK setting and supernaturally-gifted and motherly protagonist, it's a film with a lot of the same DNA as Mary Poppins — and while it might not have Julie Andrews in the lead role it does have the great Angela Lansbury, who is basically the next best thing.
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