. . . at least could be counted upon to last six minutes, be constructed by fewer than ten credited people, and feature Mel Blanc's two cents worth. COYOTE FALLS is copyrighted 2010. It's shorter than three minutes, but has three slides listing hundreds of mostly indecipherable (even on freeze-frame and zoom) names with corresponding job titles, and there's not a peep out of Mr. Blanc. (It's as if the animators of a Golden Age Looney Tunes decided to tack on a credits list of every person EACH ONE OF THEM had met in their lives, on the theory that if any of that horde had rubbed out an animator, the cartoon may have gone unfinished.) COYOTE FALLS begins with a slide listing the number "345180." Is this supposed to be its "Vitaphone Listing?" If so, who has the time to watch hundreds of thousands of shorts, even IF half of them are as brief as COYOTE FALLS?! There's little to note of the substance of these 179 seconds. It's said that some films, such as light bulb inventor Thomas Alva Edison's ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT (1904, available at the U.S. Library of Congress web site) are "short but sweet." COYOTE FALLS can be best described as "short but sour."

It was nice to see this short. And it is short. Less than three minutes as opposed to the normal seven that shorts were from about 1929 onward. Fine direction and animation for the most part. However, there is a fatal flaw. With the Road Runner in the past there was always a gray line concerning his participation in the Coyoyte's mishaps. Unfortunately during this short the Roadrunner directs sticking out his tongue at the Coyote, which he never did in the past. This is a conscious misstep by the director and a shame. Innocence is lost in the Roadrunner's character when he becomes a willing participant. Poor choice in an otherwise delightful short.

It is nice to see the Coyote and Roadrunner return to the screen with this 3-D CGI film. However, there are two serious problems with this worthwhile project. First, it was shown before a horrible full-length film which few would endure in order to see "Coyote Falls"! Currently, "Cats & Dogs 2" is in the IMDb's Bottom 100 list--hardly an auspicious place to display this film! Second, at only about three minutes, it's just too short--especially as the average non-CGI version of the duo was usually about 7-8 minutes. Still, it's a nice START and I sure hope to see more in the future--more Looney Tunes shorts and hopefully a lot longer than 3 minutes! What I did see, however, was very good--much like the 1950s-60s version updated with state of the art modern animation.

When I heard that Warner Bros. Animation were producing a trio of 3-minute Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote theatrical shorts in CGI, I pondered how many Looney Tunes fans would prefer the classic Chuck Jones versions over the Friz Freleng and Robert McKimsversion and the lackluster 2003 short film, "Whizzard of Ow". But when I watched "Coyote Falls" in front of "Cats and Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore", I became totally astounded in a positive fashion as I noticed its qualitative merits. Chuck Jones' classic feel of the Road Runner and Coyote animation has been successfully translated into the CG realm, thanks to a Chuck Jones-dedicated film director Matthew O' Callaghan bent on bringing any cartoony style into CGI. Also, there are musical cues of Carl Stalling, in which everyone can recognize them right when they grow up with the Looney Tunes. Even stereoscopic 3-D is used effectively on gags, timing and pacing, aside from depth of field.When it comes to Friz Freleng or Robert McKimson on directing the Road Runner and Coyote shorts from the mid-1960s, he ignored the original RR&C template by Jones and chose to go onto a different take: A central idea of the cartoon as an gag instead of the other way round and Coyote's occasional successes on capturing his feathered nemesis. The result: those shorts turned out to be unfavorable and forgettable. But when it comes to Matt O' Callaghan, he did a tremendous job on not only centering a gag without breaking the true and original RR&C premise, but more importantly bringing a 3-minute RR&C cartoon (not 6 or 7 minutes as usual!) to the rank of Jones' RR&C cartoons as we all know. (If you don't believe me, just check out "Daffy Duck for President" and "Porky and Daffy: the William Tell Overture" and see the differences.)There are still more Road Runner and Coyote shorts, coming to theaters and the 2010 revamp of "the Looney Tunes Show", so let's hope they can be good as or better than "Coyote Falls"!