Annecy: Warner Bros. Announces New ‘Cartoonist-Driven’ Looney Tunes Shorts Program

There’s been a lot of Looney Tunes reboots in recent years, but there’s one adjective that’s always been missing from those projects: “cartoonist-driven.”

That all changes with today’s announcement. Warner Bros. Animation has just revealed an incredibly exciting project: new Looney Tunes shorts that will be written and drawn by cartoonists, which the studio says will allow the cartoonists’ “own personality and style to come through in each cartoon.”

This is the closest we’ve been in a long time to the old Warner Bros. system where individual directors like Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Frank Tashlin, and Bob McKimson had free creative rein to make the cartoons they wanted to make. The best of those cartoons that they made became classics that have stood the test of time, and if these shorts follow that pattern, they’re guaranteed to draw new attention to the iconic Looney Tunes gang, who have largely been forgotten by today’s kids.

Warner Bros. Animation is going all out on these shorts too. They’re making 1,000 minutes of new shorts, and they’re promoting a “high production value” which is industry speak for a higher-than-usual production budget. The cartoons will vary in length, from one to six minutes, and everything — from the premise through the jokes — will take a “cartoonist-driven approach to storytelling.”

The masterminds behind this initiative are Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Digital Series president Sam Register, and Uncle Grandpa creator Pete Browngardt. They will both serve as executive producers. Personal commentary here, but if you’re going to do something like this, I can’t imagine a more perfect combination of executive and creator to pull this off.

“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,” Register said in a press statement.

The shorts will be distributed across multiple platforms including digital, mobile, and broadcast. Launch date is 2019.