What makes a classic Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon funny is the inventiveness of the Coyote, and the lengths he'll go to get some bird meat in his stomach. He's "wily", somewhat flamboyant, overly confident and eager for his schemes to work. This short has none of this.
We laugh when Wile E. Coyote's elaborate schemes fail and backfire. Some times the backfire is painful, but we laugh at his far reaching creativeness to combine several inventions into a giant ridiculous plot or contraption, and then winds up harming him instead of the Road Runner. But there's none of that here.
What we get in this short is Wile E. Coyote being smacked around and walloped without rhyme or reason, other than he tried to get the road runner (yet again) but it's more or less just a failure for the sake of being a failure. And so we see him get hit, smacked, walloped, and so forth without the wily coyote's inventiveness. Without his "super genius".
In short it's just violence for the sake of it, and it's really not funny in the least. You don't see Mister Super Genius overly confidant only to suffer some comeuppance due to bad planning or the laws of physics not cooperating. You see an animal getting smacked around for the sake of it.
It's not funny. The Coyote is not creative. He's not inventive. He's used as a ragdoll as he goes from one painful episode of getting hit to another.
Mister Matthew O'Callaghan, you're no Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, Chuck Jones nor Friz Freling. How you got handed this assignment, much less become a director, is beyond me. I think Jones said it took three years to get a short done, from concept to being put up on the screen. These look like they were thrown together on a weekend. There about as painful to watch as the Wile E Coyote actually getting hit. They're dull, not thematic in the least (the coyote wants to live in previous EPs, and so does the road runner), regardless of how dynamic they look.
Please pass the torch.
