We’re living in a time of great uncertainty amidst the heavy consolidation of the film industry. Paramount has been promising to be a good caretaker of Warner Bros., as many fear the inevitable layoffs that come when two titans of the entertainment landscape live under one roof. The production, cancellation, and return of Coyote vs. Acme should serve as a warning sign for anyone who thinks that these big studios care about anything other than their immediate bottom line.

The Looney Tunes are Warner Bros.’s most precious asset, one of the great treasures of American media. Warner Bros.’s treatment of their iconic intellectual property, demonstrated their complete apathy toward the legacy they’re supposed to steward. All of that is on full display, three years later, as the once-cancelled film finally hits theaters.

The film follows Wile E. Coyote, finally fed up with the quality of goods he’s been buying from the Acme Corporation all these years. Coyote brings his case to the law offices of Avery, Jones & Maltese. The senior partner, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), specializes in personal injury cases of cartoon violence. Rejecting Kevin’s urging for a quick settlement, Coyote instead chooses to take Acme to task for foiling his efforts to capture the Road Runner.

Director Dave Green’s work succeeds on many levels. Coyote vs. Acme pokes fun at the exploitative levers of capitalism through a nuanced layer of Looney Tunes’ magic. The film pays homage to nearly a century of lore while never resting on the laurels of nostalgia. This story is less a deconstruction than an expansion, putting the Looney Tunes back on the big screen, where many, maybe not their corporate overlords, believe they belong.

The film has a lot of obvious parallels with the real-life trials and tribulations of Warner Bros. A big corporation exploits cartoons to gauge the viability of human exploitation, something we see every day. The film finds most of its magic in the chemistry between Coyote and Kevin. Forte works wonders opposite the film’s silent protagonist, finding great emotional depth in the film’s quieter moments when the anvils aren’t dropping, and the TNT isn’t going off.

Coyote vs. Acme pulls off a level of intimacy rarely seen from massive intellectual properties anymore. This is a film trying to tell a story, not pad its runtime with a parade of throwbacks and celebrity cameos, which isn’t to say that there aren’t stars. John Cena puts forth some of the best work of his career as Buddy Crane, Acme’s principal lawyer and Kevin’s law school classmate.

But this is a film with some of the most iconic characters in American history that isn’t trying to be a blockbuster. Wile E. Coyote is one of the most memorable characters in the Looney Tunes roster, but he isn’t an obvious choice to anchor one of their few major theatrical releases, just as Will Forte is hardly known as a Hollywood leading man. The two are perfect for each other, achieving a kind of smaller-scale magic that we don’t see too often anymore.

The animation is beautiful, blending seamlessly with the live-action setting. The script has humor for audiences of all ages. There are a lot of genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. Best of all, the film doesn’t draw all its comedy from low-hanging nostalgia.

Where the film falls a little short is in the mechanics of the screenplay. The hybrid animation approach is bound to draw comparisons to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the genre’s gold standard. Part of what made Roger Rabbit work so well was that it was a genuinely good noir story. The best satire understands the mechanics of its source material.

Coyote vs. Acme has a lot of scenes in the courtroom, but it’s not a particularly good legal film. The narrative beats are easier to spot than Wile E. Coyote’s desert antics. Much of this wouldn’t be much of an issue if the film didn’t hold back on the reality of its existence. Everything is just a little too predictable.

Few would expect a Warner Bros. property to go very hard on Warner Bros. as a company, but it passes on the chance to offer some interesting perspectives, particularly between its protagonist Kevin’s lack of ambition and the stagnant nature of the film industry as a whole. Art is supposed to be challenging. Good art often shows us something new. We don’t see either of those things coming from the big studios anymore.

Part of why Coyote vs. Acme’s cancellation was so sad at the time was that all reports indicated that this was a quality film. That turned out to be true. A studio was ready to put an installment of its most-treasured franchise out to pasture, just because it wasn’t going to be the hottest film of the summer.

It took the work of another distributor, Ketchup Entertainment, for this film to see the light of day. There’s something so profoundly unsettling about the idea that a major studio suppressed quality work in the name of a tax write-off. It’s hard not to leave the theater thinking that if the big studios had their way, we’d be eating nothing but slop.