“I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit landed in the summer of 1988 and re-focused American pop culture on live actors performing alongside animated characters. Ancillary markets did double-time, pushing toys and apparel off shelves and racks, and the “how’d they do that?” vibe helped shift entertainment reportage towards technical explanation rather than the stakes of celebrity gossip or mass market reviews. But Roger Rabbit is a strange movie that requires re-examination.
First, there’s the title, written in question form, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” without a question mark that shifts the point from what’s on-screen to how it got there. This is notable because the movie’s source, Gary K. Wolf’s 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, clearly asks a question, letting us know we’re involved with a tradition that includes Raymond Chandler. The movie is, therefore, highly meta- and circuitous, and it presents itself as a self-conscious exercise in technological virtuosity that never really integrates live actors with animated characters, although its desperation to do so is sometimes called “amazing.” To be fair, it’s all quite impressive, but my feeling is that this benchmark of innovation is best understood as the grandparent of any CGI-related contemporary moviemaking, rather than being a signal of brilliant art.
The second big feature of Roger Rabbit is its awareness of the history of Hollywood, particularly in the immediate post-World War II moment when Los Angeles was about to expand through the Federal Highway act, thereby modernizing the metropolis as a car haven without concern for the lives of sentient creatures. And these sentient creatures are divided into flesh-and-blood people and “toons,” those sprung-to-life Disney and Warner Bros. animated characters from the post-War moment, here presented as part of the “natural” landscape of Los Angeles.
Our point-of-view character is a former cop-turned-private investigator, Eddie Valiant, played by the live actor Bob Hoskins, whose investigation forces him to partner with Roger Rabbit, an animated, Bugs Bunny-esque masochist voiced by Charles Fleischer in a plosive, vaudevillian style.
Together, Eddie and Roger roll back the conspiracy of Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), an insane toon who has managed to disguise himself as a human being in order to wield the power of imminent domain and bulldoze Toon Town, a paradise filled with animated characters, from Mickey Mouse to Yosemite Sam, located along the construction route of a highway to Pasadena. Each set piece along the way asks us to marvel at the integration of toons with live actors, and, further, to accept that the live actors relate to, even have intimate relations with, the toons we see in this Boomer nostalgia exercise sold to Gen X as peak summer fun.
Most people leave Roger Rabbit with vivid memories of Jessica Rabbit, voiced by Kathleen Turner, a red-dressed femme fatale, and an animated woman with hyberbolic curves who is the wife of a rabbit. Or people remember Baby Herman, voiced by a Lou Hirsch, a foul-mouthed middle-aged man trapped in a toddler’s body, who nonetheless smokes cigars, sexually harasses women, and behaves as the dark face of male excitation.
Then, as now, though, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is slow. Each new scene of Eddie’s investigation, whether entering a showroom with dueling pianos (Daffy Duck vs. Donald Duck) or enduring a home invasion by Doom’s animated weasel gang, causes us amazement, but so what? We wonder how Zemeckis and his team managed to present us with so much multi-media in each single frame; then the movie grinds on through Eddie’s trials, showing him to be a largely unsympathetic lead and exposing how thin the story really is. In fact, it’s the very genius of the movie’s opening that shows how and why the rest of the movie is a kind of failure.
We open in the middle of a Roger Rabbit cartoon adventure, wherein Roger is watching Baby Herman as Herman wanders around, getting into mischief, forcing Roger to be thrashed to protect him. When a refrigerator drops on Roger’s head, he pops out from the vegetable tray and goofs up his line delivery. Cut. The camera pulls back to reveal live people assisting the animated performers, and everyone is trying to manage the problem of making a movie, on-time and under budget.
It’s genius, and it ends inside five minutes, leading us to hope the whole movie will maintain this level of self-awareness and wonder. Almost 100 minutes later, the movie steadily ratchets up the number of moving parts but never once improves on the opening insight that centers on how live people and cartoons might work together if all the flaws of mortal humanity were attached to animated characters.
–November 30, 2019
