As one becomes a grown-up, it gets harder and harder to devote the time necessary to watch Saturday-morning cartoons every week. Which means that most of us have fallen sadly behind on our Looney Tunes viewing. Luckily, the students of Paris’ Gobelins School of Image have created Burning Safari, a very funny CG animated short that feels like a Road Runner cartoon for the new millennium. A gaggle of squeaky noise-making robot extraterrestrials land on our planet and begin taking pictures. One particularly intrepid robot strays a bit far from the jungle and the others. He comes across a monkey. They connect. Well, sort of. Although it promises at first to be a cross between 2001 and E.T. as reimagined by Pixar, this irreverent little short turns out to be the exact opposite: short and … well, not exactly sweet. —Bilge Ebiri
