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“Tweety’s High-Flying Adventure” is a difficult cartoon to review. At a mere 70 minutes in length, it’s more like a lengthy TV special than a feature film. With a convoluted plot and more Looney Tunes cameos than than the entire run of the “Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries” TV series, it ranks among the oddest curios in WB cartoon history.

“High-Flying Adventure” can’t seem to decide what it wants to be, and ends up being a film without an audience. It tries so heavy-handedly to appeal to kids, parents, fans of the extreme sports craze, and cartoon geeks that it gets tangled in its own clutter.

            Plot-wise, Granny, Tweety and Sylvester visit London , where Granny discovers that a children’s park is going to be closed down. She visits Colonel Rimfire, who is so fed up with Cool Cat he bets his fortune that there is no creature on earth smarter than a feline. Granny decides to take Rimfire’s bet to pay for the reopening of the park and to prove that Tweety can outsmart any cat. After a rather unnecessary song, Tweety goes off on an “around the world in 80 days” journey, with a passport that must be stamped by Customs in every country along the way, and the paw prints of 80 cats. Sylvester, of course, chases him the whole way.

            Tweety also acquires a girlfriend in the Himalayas , a pink canary named “Aoogah”, named for her loud yell that sounds like a warning siren. She is as forgettable as she is pointless. The journey itself seems like a vehicle to showcase every Warner Bros. cartoon character you can name, and the more obscure the better. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Lola Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, Penelope, the Minah Bird and Lion (minus Inki), Pete Puma, Gossamer, Hugo the Abominable Snowman, Hubie and Bertie, Yosemite Sam, Speedy Gonzales, Hippety Hopper, Taz, the Shropshire Slasher, Rocky, Mugsy, Pussyfoot, Marc Anthony, Marvin Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk, Miss Prissy, Eggbert Junior, Cool Cat…and if you pay attention you’ll probably catch more. Sound like too many cameos? It is. Sadly, with the lack of Looney Tunes on TV these days, the average kid isn’t going to know who the hell these characters are, let alone get an understanding of them (most have only 2 or 3 speaking lines, if any at all).

There are, however, a few highlights. The voice work is great, lead by Joe Alaskey and including June Foray, Stan Freberg, Jim Cummings, Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennett, and others. Only Yosemite Sam sounds off-puttingly awful. The bit with Taz taking Sylvester on a wild mountain bike ride is surprisingly hilarious, mostly due to Cummings’ always-great voice work with Taz. The animation looks nice, and the impressionistic, delightfully crazy backgrounds from “Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries” are back (probably because this film was made by the same crew). Tweety’s asides about all the extreme sports are funny, especially considering it must’ve been how the animators themselves felt. Apparently, Warner Bros. was trying to push a merchandising line of characters doing extreme sports at the time, and insisted that be a recurring theme.

All things considered, it’s not a horrible film. It’s an adequate time-waster that belongs right where it ended up the first time it was released 7 years ago: the bargain bin at Wal-Mart and the occasional airing on Cartoon Network. If you have never seen it, it’s worth a rental, but you won’t feel the need to own it and watch it over and over again.

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