2027 Oscars Short Film Contenders: ‘Daffy Season’ Directors Hamish Grieve And Todd Wilderman

Welcome to Cartoon Brew’s series of spotlights focusing on the animated shorts that have qualified for the 2027 Oscars. The films in this series have qualified through one of multiple routes: by winning an Oscar-qualifying award at a film festival, by exhibiting theatrically, or by winning a Student Academy Award.

Today’s short is Daffy Season, directed by Hamish Grieve and Todd Wilderman and produced by Susan Slagle Rogers for Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, with animation by DNEG Animation. The CG short draws on the designs and staging of classic Looney Tunes while incorporating painted textures, hand-drawn effects, and an increasingly expansive approach to camera movement and sound found in more modern animation. It qualified for Oscar consideration through a theatrical run.

Daffy is ready for duck season, but Elmer Fudd has found something more compelling than hunting: World Cup soccer. As the other Tunes all fall under the same spell, Daffy’s pathological need for attention sends him into a world the directors envisioned as a cartoon Dario Argento movie. For Grieve and Wilderman, reversing the familiar hunter-and-prey relationship unlocked the comedy. Their Daffy would rather risk being shot than accept being ignored.

Cartoon Brew: What was it about this story or concept that connected with you and compelled you to direct the film?

Hamish Grieve and Todd Wilderman: First and foremost, we both grew up watching and loving Looney Tunes. Even though we were raised on different sides of the Atlantic, like so many others, we spent Saturday mornings in our PJs eating sugary cereal and enjoying hefty doses of cartoon violence. Maybe this explains our love of horror, and putting Daffy in a cartoon Dario Argento movie was a dream come true.

Added to that, Hamish is a huge soccer/football fan — come on, you Gunners! — and having Yosemite Sam complain about esoteric soccer tactics was a career highlight.

What did you learn through the experience of making this film, either production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creatively, or about the subject matter?

The original Looney Tunes were operating at such a high level of creative and artistic achievement, and making something that could honor this legacy was incredibly hard. It made us even more in awe of the original artists of Termite Terrace.

The short became a deep dive into the techniques of the original cartoons: honing gags, milking poses, pushing things until they break. And figuring out how to do it all in seven minutes. We both feel that this short was a boot camp for our animated filmmaking.

Can you describe how you developed your visual approach to the film? Why did you settle on this style and technique?

Maurice Noble was the GOAT, but we asked ourselves: If he were working now, what would he do to push the medium forward? We wanted to honor his legacy but also use all the techniques that CG allows. And we didn’t want to redesign or reinvent the characters, but find a version of them that worked and felt true to Chuck Jones’s original designs, especially.

We wanted to feel the hand of the artist in every frame, from the painted textures of the sets to the hand-drawn spittle from Daffy’s beak. The short became a journey from what we think of as classic Looney Tunes, then detoured through horror and ended up in a giant modern stadium.

The filmmaking techniques changed to reflect this journey, going from a muted color palette with film grain, mono sound, and proscenium staging with no depth of field to sweeping camera moves and all the bells and whistles that Dolby Atmos could provide.

Daffy is usually desperate to avoid being hunted, but here he’s desperate for Elmer’s attention. What interested you about reversing that relationship?

This was the key that unlocked the short for us. Daffy’s narcissistic tendencies trump his self-preservation instincts, and this became the comedy engine of the short. A duck that would rather be shot than ignored sounds insane, but this is Daffy we’re talking about!