The Greats: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Zemeckis' trip to Toontown is one of the great films of the 1980s.
The Greats will be an ongoing, occasional series I do where I look back at some of the films I love the most to see how well they hold up and what new insight they might hold.
The first movie I ever became obsessed with was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The 1988 live action-animation hybrid, released when I was 9, commanded my attention like no other film had at that point. I had a talking Roger Rabbit doll, the film’s soundtrack and even an auction book filled with pictures of cels available for purchase. I recorded and watched the behind-the-scenes television special several times, wrote my own sequels to read to my classmates, and even gathered friends to plot how we would make our own Roger Rabbit movie.
I should note that I didn’t even see the actual film until nearly a year later.
My parents (wisely) didn’t take me to see it when it was in theaters. I’m not really sure how it even got on my radar. But here’s how I think it happened: Like many kids, I was a Disney lover. My grandmother worked for Sears, which had a partnership with the studio, and she received a magazine devoted to behind-the-scenes looks at films, amusement parks and television series. Our church’s disdain for cinema and our family’s clandestine trips to the theater cultivated not only a love for movies, but also an awareness that they were important enough to pay attention to. My theory is that if you took a Disney animated movie and coupled it with a then-novel PG rating for such a film (it was for grownups!), it must have been catnip. I obsessed over the film for nearly a year and saved up my money to pre-order it when it hit VHS. I quickly wore out my copy.
Released with much (deserved) ado about its technical marvels, the film still manages to stagger with its seamless mix of live action and animation. But each revisit has revealed that this film is more than just an amazing technical exercise. It’s a funny, fast and whip-smart love letter to the movies, and it should be mentioned alongside the best films of the 1980s.
Looney world
Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes place in a 1947 Hollywood where humans and cartoons (“toons”) live side by side. The film starts off with what appears to be a typical Looney Tunes-esque animated feature, in which clumsy babysitter Roger Rabbit has to keep the baby he’s taking care of out of harm’s way. It’s a madcap sequence that stops short when Roger flubs his line (when hit, birds appear around his head instead of the scripted stars). The shot pulls back to reveal that these “animated” films take place on constructed sets, and the toons are hired actors (the sweet baby is actually a cranky, stogie-smoking 50-year-old). Hollywood backlots swarm with sentient brooms, tutu-clad hippos and cows in line for a literal cattle call.
Shortly after Roger’s on-set mishaps, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) walks onto the lot of Maroon Studios. Eddie’s an ill-tempered, hard-drinking private eye who’s been hired to tail Roger’s wife Jessica (voiced by Kathleen Turner), a sultry, impossibly curvaceous lounge singer at a local “toon review” club. Valiant discovers Jessica in a compromised position (playing patty-cake) with novelty tycoon Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye). When Eddie shows the pictures to Roger, he’s crushed and tears out of the office, making a rabbit-shaped hole in the wall. The next day, Acme turns up dead — a safe dropped on his head. Roger, believing he’s been framed and trying to elude the vicious Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), comes to Eddie to help solve the crime.
Movie Magic
As I said, my first exposure to Who Framed Roger Rabbit came from a behind-the-scenes television special aired shortly before the film’s release. Because I wasn’t able to see the film in theaters, I watched and re-watched the VHS of that special, obsessing over just how they brought the toons and humans together. I understood it was a mix of animatronics, green screen and good old movie magic, but it still amazed me how I could stare at a frame of the film with no effects — just, say, a robotic arm to give the illusion that Roger was spitting out water — and then be shown the same scene populated with the animated characters a second later, and still find the effect completely credible.
Nearly 35 years after its release, these effects still hold up wonderfully — you forget about the gimmick very quickly and just accept a world where the toons and humans coexist. I don’t watch Roger handcuffing himself to Eddie and dashing under a bed and think “how did they do that” because, honestly, I don’t want to know. This movie is so ably assembled that I’m perfectly happy to believe it’s just movie magic.
Watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, I receive the same feeling I get when I watch the original King Kong, Jurassic Park, or the first hour of Richard Donner’s Superman — even if I can figure out how they did it, I don’t care. Although it’s the work of thousands of animators, special effects technicians, actors and crew people, it’s all real on the screen.
Zemeckis and his crew created new technology for the film, carefully mapping out every shot and finding innovative ways to create the illusion that the toons were interacting with objects and people. The camera zips and zooms around the set, and the actors — a fantastically game Hoskins in particular — not only had to careen around the room to keep up with their non-existent costars, but also credibly interact with empty space and maintain eye contact with characters who wouldn’t be added in until post-production. Roger Ebert’s review sums up the effect of all the painstaking work:
In a way, what you feel when you see a movie like this is more than appreciation. It’s gratitude. You know how easy it is to make dumb, no-brainer action movies, and how incredibly hard it is to make a movie like this, where every minute of screen time can take days or weeks of work by the animators. You’re glad they went to the trouble.
Today, Who Framed Roger Rabbit holds up better than many of the highly lauded technical marvels of CGI’s early days (go back and watch the first Spider-man or The Mummy Returns). While I think part of that can be explained by the film’s plot — because the toons are literally supposed to be ink-and-paint characters, we accept the effect a bit more readily — I think it’s a great credit to the ingenuity of the cast and crew, who threw everything they had into creating a perfect illusion and were up for any challenge that came their way. We’re always aware that none of this is real, but we never question its reality.
Forget it Eddie, it’s Toontown
Today, we’re bombarded by films overrun with special effects. But with Roger Rabbit, the movie magic is essential to the plot, and delivered via a script so deft that you’re never so floored by the whimsy that you aren’t also engaged in the story.
I said that I’m shocked that the film isn’t mentioned more when people talk about the best films of the ’80s, but I’m even more shocked that it’s so slow to come to the conversation when people talk about the best movies about movies. The script by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman (very loosely based off a novel by Gary Wolf, Who Censored Roger Rabbit) is in love with Golden Age Hollywood; not just the animated films, but Tinseltown history and the tropes of film noir.
The “real world” Eddie inhabits is actually just as fake (to us) as Toontown. It’s a version of Hollywood that’s only ever existed in hard-boiled detective movies. The screenplay has a great time filtering in tough-guy dialogue with a movie twist (“What do you know about showbiz, Mr. Valiant?” “Only that there’s no business like it…no business I know”), and the film is populated with wonderful noir archetypes — the alcoholic detective with a troubled past, the innocent patsy, the femme fatale, the stern authority figure breathing down the detective’s neck, and a variety of colorful characters to help the P.I. on his quest. And the film’s mystery, which involves the history of LA’s public transportation, could easily fit in a non-animated mystery (the subject was once going to be used for the third Chinatown movie).
The noir structure is vital to making Roger Rabbit work. Like many noirs, the plot is not really the point; the world is. The script sets up a playground where the anarchy and insanity of cartoons butts up to the hard-edged conventions of mystery thrillers. There’s a femme fatale played by an impossibly rendered, curvaceous woman (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”) and an evil scheme designed not to simply clear out land but to wipe out an entire section of the city; it just so happens that, in this section of the city, the laws of physics are shattered every second. When the P.I. saunters into that most cliché of noir settings — a secret lounge — he encounters not just a sultry singer, but the most insane musical entertainment put to film.
The script steers into every noir convention, undercutting it all with animated insanity, letting the characters accept it as an everyday occurrence. In a film told with less confidence, Eddie would be a Toontown newbie, a surrogate to hold the audience’s hand and walk them into this new world. Instead, he’s a Toontown veteran with his own tragic experiences — a toon killed his brother by dropping a piano on his head. A quick tour of his desk, his brother’s mementos still preserved, is an efficient and surprisingly touching bit of exposition. Instead of making us aware of the gimmick, presenting this world without explanation or question makes it feel more believable.
Zemeckis has always best when he’s up against a technological challenge. But it’s been way too long since he’s delivered something as purely entertaining as Back to the Future or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s refreshing to see the director let the effects work at the service of the story instead of rubbing our noses in them, and to be reminded that he’s capable of great wit and energy. There are several moments – Roger escaping the speakeasy via the “shave-and-a-haircut trick,” the opening cartoon, Roger and Eddie’s encounter at the office, and the bizarre musical climax — where the film lets its Looney Tune physics bleed over into the real world and the film crackles with electricity as the strange bedfellows of animated shorts and hard-boiled detective movies combine.
The film’s highlight is Eddie’s trip to Toontown — well-known because of the moment where he encounters Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny (Disney and Warner Brother famously required their flagship characters to have equal time and dialogue, which is why they appear together). As Eddie outruns a lusty hag, plummets from a skyscraper and fires off his “Dum Dum” bullets, Bob Hoskins is fantastic. It’s one thing to spout tough-guy dialogue. It’s another to maintain eye contact with characters who aren’t sharing the same physical space. It’s still another to deliver the physical comedy required here, as Hoskins careens off walls while handcuffed to a cartoon rabbit, is smushed down into the floor of an elevator by Droopy Dog, and performs a slapstick dance to make his captors laugh themselves to death. Hoskins is tremendous in what became his most iconic role.
Charles Fleischer keeps Roger (and assorted other characters) funny without being grating, and Turner plays into her Body Heat image with Jessica’s sultry voice. Christopher Lloyd walks a fine line between funny and menacing in a role that gave many ‘80s children nightmares and is among is most iconic. They play it just straight enough for the film to avoid becoming a punchline, but they also know when to lean into the goofy curve required.
The film is a triumph of tone, in which every cast and crew member is on the same page, delivering something that works as comedy, technical exercise and adventure. It’s funny without being dumb, respectful of Golden Age Hollywood while still capturing the anarchy of classic animation, and immensely entertaining without feeling like a cheap thrill or empty blockbuster.
With most of these entries of films I love and have seen countless times, I hope to find some new nugget of insight or depth. With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I don’t know that there’s much more beneath the service. But there doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, perfectly calibrated entertainment is its own reward. And I can think of few films as purely fun and pleasurable as this.