Post by That Duckfan on Feb 18, 2021 22:51:39 GMT
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman
Based on the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf
Director of Photography Dean Cundey
Director of Animation Richard Williams
Starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Stubby Kaye, and Charles Fleischer as the voice of Roger Rabbit
Featuring Alan Tilvern, Richard LeParmentier, Joel Silver, Paul Springer, Richard Ridings, Edwin Craig, Lindsay Holiday, Mike Edmonds, and Betsy Brantley
With Danny Capri, Christopher Hollosy, John-Paul Sipla, Laura Frances, Joel Cutrara, Billy J. Mitchell, Ed Herlihy, with James O'Connell, and Eugene Gutierrez
Voiced by April Winchell, Lou Hirsch, Eric B. Sindon, Morgan Deare, Kathleen Turner with Amy Irving, David Lander, Fred Newman, Pat Buttram, Jim Cummings, Jim Gallant
Incidental voices by Frank Welker, Mary T. Radford, Joe Alaskey, Nancy Cartwright, Les Perkins, Richard Williams, June Foray, Tony Pope, Peter Westy, Cherry Davis
And featuring the voice talents of Mae Questel, Mel Blanc, Tony Anselmo with Clarence Nash, Bill Farmer, Wayne Allwine, Russi Taylor, and Frank Sinatra
Academy Award for Best Sound - Robert Knudson, John Boyd, Don Digirolamo, Tony Dawe - nominated
Academy Award for Best Sound Effects Editing - Charles L. Campbell and Louis Edemann - WON
Academy Award for Best Art Direction - Elliot Scott, Peter Howitt - nominated
Academy Award for Best Cinematography - Dean Cundey - nominated
Academy Award for Best Film Editing - Arthur Schmidt - WON
Academy Award for Best Visual Effects - Ken Ralston, Richard Williams, Ed Jones, George Gibbs - WON
Special Achievement Academy Award for Animation Direction - Richard Williams - WON
Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit: Somethin's Cookin' (1947)
Director Raoul J. Raoul
Starring Herman Herman, Roger Rabbit, Kathleen Herman
Herman tries to get a cookie from the cookie jar atop the fridge. Cartoon violence ensues as Roger tries to keep him safe. Yup, the same of formulaic crap Maroon keeps churning out month after month. Give me a break!
Director Raoul J. Raoul
Starring Herman Herman, Roger Rabbit, Kathleen Herman
Herman tries to get a cookie from the cookie jar atop the fridge. Cartoon violence ensues as Roger tries to keep him safe. Yup, the same of formulaic crap Maroon keeps churning out month after month. Give me a break!
And yet, despite all this, it remains a one-off, a once-in-a-generation movie. Whatever happened to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
It's the mid-1980s. Eisner and Katzenberg are looking for their claim to fame: a movie that would allow them to market Disney animation as a serious competitor in the movie industry. One promising project is an adaptation of the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a contemporary story featuring a human private detective and a cartoon rabbit. The blending of the book and comic strip medium provided enticing possibilities, but to pull this off in live-action and animation would require an unprecedented amount of money. So, Eisner and Katzenberg go to the one man in Hollywood who can make this a reality: producer Steven Spielberg. With director Robert Zemeckis and composer Alan Silvestri in tow, Spielberg provided the necessary leverage for the complicated negotiations behind the movie to proceed.
Looking at Who Framed Roger Rabbit now, it certainly fits in a Spielbergian mold. It's a big blockbuster with themes of childhood and nostalgia, something that fits him and the era he helped define to a tee. Part of this is due to Zemeckis and Silvestri, whose lily-white recreation of midcentury middle America reflects their previous work on Back to the Future.
Incidentally, the two movies share a common location: the bridge that serves as the tunnel to Toontown is the same one where they try to catch Biff Tannen and his sports almanac going home from the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Ironically, the vast majority of this movie was shot in Hertfordshire, England, boasting a bigger British cast than any Disney movie thus far, including our live-action lead. Even the animation, spearheaded by Richard Williams, was done in London.
And what great animation it is. Williams is a real master of the medium, and his mastery is on full display in this movie. Of course, to eyes now trained by decades of (computer-generated) animation in live-action movies, there is the occasional lack of weight and other physics-based discrepancies that are tell-tale signs of practical effects at work. Still, when it works, it really works.
That said, this movie is lightning in a bottle. A lot of people entertaining a Roger Rabbit sequel will point to the animation landscape or the willingness of studios to lend out their characters, but for me it's more elemental than that. For me, watching a full-length feature like Roger Rabbit reiterates what Max Fleischer knew decades earlier: mixing animation and live-action is a great gimmick, but it has certain storytelling limitations.
And in this sense the movie starts to fall apart. We have a Spielberg-Zemeckis world inhabited by Disney animation of Warner Bros. characters with Tex Avery humor. It doesn't really belong in any of these worlds, or in a world of its' own: it's an animator's fanfic. Many characters are purposefully distorted to fit the model of a "Toon" they've constructed, and the ones central to the story tend to be either unusually human for a Toon, like Jessica, or annoying, like Roger.
Yeah, Roger is annoying. He's less a character and more a heap of quirks to serve as a foil to Eddie, Jessica, and Doom. When Donald, Goofy, or Daffy featured in their noir pastiches back in the day, they would each act and react according to their character. Roger doesn't have much of a developed character, beyond wacky hijinks and comic pratfalls. He reinforces, rather than dissolves, the divide between live-action and animation.
Toontown
Why are all the cars and buildings animated too? That's a staple of retro cartoons now, but we're not in the days of rubber hose animation here. You can tell they only had a few minutes to shove in as many animated characters as possible. It's a weird trip.
Why are all the cars and buildings animated too? That's a staple of retro cartoons now, but we're not in the days of rubber hose animation here. You can tell they only had a few minutes to shove in as many animated characters as possible. It's a weird trip.
Alternatively, this is the other side of Spielbergian cinema: no message, just spectacle. Roger Rabbit doesn't have anything explicit to say about Toons or corrupt judges. It's just hollow nostalgia presented in a timely manner, a Ready Player One for animation buffs and people of a certain age. Remember Lena Hyena? Remember Danny the black lamb?
Ultimately, the reason why Roger Rabbit never got a sequel is because it's too much like Fantasia. A great effort to create 'serious' animation was undermined by the extreme risk involved in its production. The Roger Rabbit publicity push petered out once Disney developed better mascots. But those who say Roger Rabbit is the last of its kind, should check out how contemporary blockbusters are made. Every big name nowadays is in the Bob Hoskins school of (computer-assisted) acting!
Hi, and welcome to the section known as 'the end credits', where I gather some remaining thoughts. Christopher Lloyd, truly one of the great character actors of his generation, in his prime! What a magnificent villain he played. That freeway speech he did was something else, let me tell you. It should be taught in schools. Highlight of the movie.