1988 • PG • 1h 44mins • Watch trailer • Rent it • Stream on Disney+
🕵️♂️ Who Framed Who? A Chinatown→ & Who Framed Roger Rabbit Double-Feature
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like oregano. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I rent from Blockbuster to go with this?” You remind him that last week you watched Chinatown→ per his rec. Tonight, he says, “Oh yeah, a classic! But you ever seen the one where they do a Chinatown→ with cartoons?” That’s gotta be Robert Zemeckis’s delerious 1988 masterpiece, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Let’s pop in the tape.
Here’s the plot. It’s 1947 in LA. Cartoons walk the earth alongside flesh-and-blood humans. Private Eye Eddie Valliant (Bob Hoskins), soaked in liquor and bad luck, investigates cartoon star Roger Rabbit’s (Charles Fleischer) wife, Jessica (Kathleen Turner). It’s a favor for R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) of Maroon Studios with a big payday attached. Is Roger flubbing his lines because Jessica's flubbing somebody else? Eddie gets pictures of her with gadget magnate Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye). Roger gets distraught. And Acme himself gets whacked. Evidence points to Roger doing the deed.
Against his better judgement, Eddie takes Roger under his wing and on the run. In their corner is Eddie’s old flame Dolores (Joanna Cassidy). On their tails are the merciless Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) and his Toon Patrol, who intend to execute Roger on sight with a homebrewed toon-disolving liquid called “Dip”. In the wind is dead Acme’s will, which might deed Toontown over to the toons themselves. Seems like someone doesn’t want that to happen. Eddie’s and Roger’s only safe harbor is to where Eddie said he’d never go again—Toontown. Can Eddie clear Roger’s name? Can they find Acme’s will? And can they hail a cab that’s not Danny DeVito?
This is a Disney movie?
How’d we get a bananas movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Why did Disney agree to it?
It all started with a book. In ’81 Gary K. Wolf published a weird lil’ novel titled Who Censored Roger Rabbit? The tone landed somewhere between bizarre and hard-boiled. Disney bought the rights. Screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman got down to business writing a script that used characters and elements of Wolf’s story but little else. The plot? 90% brand new. Every now and then a studio buys the rights to something like Wolf’s novel for the idea, not what the idea-haver did with it. So it was with Roger Rabbit.
In ’82 a thirty-year-old filmmaker named Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away) read Price and Seaman’s script. He fell head-over-heels for it and asked Disney to let him make it. Zemeckis was nobody back then—they passed. Disney developed the project on their own instead. At one point, Peter Renaday, who voiced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Master Splinter and Disney’s Hall of Presidents’ Abraham Lincoln (truly our nation’s Master Splinter), filled in as Eddie Valliant. Disney was throwing things at the wall to see what stuck.
But what was really stuck was Disney itself. The House of Mouse once had a reputation for high-craft animation. But by the early ‘80s nobody wanted fairy tales. Disney hadn’t had a bonafide hit since, I dunno, maybe The Rescuers (’77)? They had a department packed with the best animators in the world, but could they save them? Making a hit out of animation-IRL Roger Rabbit could turn Disney’s fortunes around.
Who Saved Roger Rabbit?
Roger Rabbit needed someone who could pull off the tone, treatment and timing. Someone who never missed. A real ringer. Disney president Michael Eisner knew who to call—a guy you mighta heard of by the name of Steven Spielberg.
In the ‘80s everyone wanted to be in the Spielberg business. And business was booming. He’d broken in with Jaws→ (’75) and made it stick with Raiders of the Lost Ark→ (’81) and E.T. the Extraterrestrial (’82). By the mid-eighties everything he touched turned to gold. Eisner knew this was his guy.
Spielberg agreed. His production company, Amblin, took on the project with a $30M budget, the most anyone had paid for an animated movie, ever. Spielberg went to work convincing Warner Bros, Universal, comics companies and a slew of others to lend him their charactes. Warner was the hardest sell. Remember Daffy and Donald’s piano duel? It plays weird in part because of an agreement to make both ducks equally bad at playing and appear for exactly the same number of frames. The indominable Spielberg made it work.
But who to direct? Spielberg himself? Too busy. By decision time in ’85, Zemeckis, fresh off making Back to the Future (’85), finally got the job. They offered it to Terry Gilliam too, but he couldn’t be bothered. “Pure laziness on my part,” he said. I mean, it does seem like a really difficult movie to make. Tom Hanks didn’t call it the “most complicated movie ever made” in CNN’s The Movies for no reason.
Spielberg and Zemeckis assembled a crack team to make Roger Rabbit, including outsider animation director Richard Williams. Only he could achieve a tone Zemeckis described as “Disney's high quality of animation, Warner Bros.' characterization, and Tex Avery humor”. Together they’d make a feature length love note to the golden era of animation. Roger Rabbit set out to remind a world who’d forgotten why animation mattered and what toons can really do.
The Rules of Roger Rabbit
Humans at the top, toons at the bottom
You can’t kill a toon (exception: Dip)
Don’t give Roger booze (exception: emergencies)
No toon can resist Shave and a Haircut
They work for peanuts
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezey
Disney’s bid to save its animation department—and maybe animation itself—from the scrap pile used every trick in the book. Shoot, it wrote a few new volumes. Why? Because making Roger Rabbit took breaking every rule. Here’s animation director Richard Williams: “Our first task was to move the camera, and the second was to find a way to light the characters so they’d look real. And then, most importantly, we’d have to have interaction.” Williams—
Wait, you can’t just dump a quote like that here! What does any of that mean?
Easy pal, I’m getting to it. Let’s take it one thing at a time.
Starting with the moving the camera thing?
Starting with the moving the camera thing. Animation wisdom said that if you’re putting cartoons and humans together, keep the camera still.
I sense a complicated reason coming…
Sorry, roll up your brain sleeves. Films play at 24 frames per second, which looks smooth to the human eye. We don’t see pictures, we see motion. For the last hundred years, animation only changed on twos, meaning the same picture shows for two frames in a row. Doesn’t look jerky, but cuts animators’ workload in half. They only have to draw 12 frames per second.
Okay, so the human footage plays at 24 unique frames per second but toons only change every other frame?
Yeah. Simple, but weird. That’s why animators say not to move the camera though. If your camera moves, you gotta draw all 24 frames of animation to keep up with the real-life footage.
But Roger Rabbit moves the camera.
Right, a lot. Even the opening cartoon animates at 24 frames per second to keep up with the action. Gives your brain a tummy ache watching it because you’ve never seen a cartoon do that. But Roger Rabbit uses that opening sequences to train your eyeballs. Once toons and humans occupy the screen together, you’re used to it.
I think I get it. Every animation took 24 frames to draw?
Exactly. But not only was it twice the normal amount of work for Disney’s animators, each frame was tough to draw too. Those wild perspective shots in the opening? All the shines on all the knives? The shelf full of objects falling? Not animation at all in my opinion. That’s art. Which is a good thing, since it took nine months just to animate that opening four minutes.
So what about the second thing? Lighting the characters to look real?
Woof, we could spend a week talking about that one. I’m only gonna spill enough computer ink to say that Industrial Light and Magic handled it with a fancy compositing process. Animators drew the matte characters as one layer, their highlights as another, their shadows as a third. It was a lot of work. But the result is the smoothest, realest thing you’ve ever seen, even today.
Okay, then what did they mean by the last thing, interaction? Were they drawing the interactions?
Some things you can’t draw. Movies live or die on a few decisions and whether or no you stick to them. Early on, they make one such call. Richard Williams: “After an hour and a half meeting with Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, we had the whole thing worked out. Spielberg captured it perfectly when he said, ‘If the rabbit sits down in an old chair, you have dust come up. He should always be touching something that’s real.’ I walked out of there in a daze, saying, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t anybody think of this earlier?'”
Well, why didn’t anyone think of that earlier?
My guess? They did. But it implies way more work than anyone wanted to do. Zemeckis used robot arms, wires, compressed air and a litany of other tricks to get props toon interact with to do real stuff. It takes a masochist to pick a job like animation. But Zemeckis also found himself animating the real world for his movie.
Uh, sounds extremely hard?
Nope, it was easy! Just kidding. Yeah, it was extremely hard. That’s why the budget went from $30M to $50M as they made the movie. Disney didn’t love that.
Okay, then why—
No more questions!
Tooned In
You asked a lot about the fun parts. Not all of Roger Rabbit is fun. Because you can’t look at Old Hollywood without looking at racism. I think toons in Roger Rabbit stand in for non-white characters—segregated, underpaid, underprivileged, shrugged off until they have power, then dangerous to their oppressors. Like actual America, what you look like has everything to do with your prospects. The word “surprising” leaps to mind to describe how mercilessly Roger Rabbit takes on racial dynamics. It’s difficult to parse what the film’s actually saying about any of that.
Also not fun: Judge Doom. Christopher Lloyd’s character wants to literally erase Toontown and build a highway over its remains in a move that deftly combines both unfettered capitalism and genocide. Why pick when a villain can have both? I know the writers hated Judge Doom too because in early drafts of the script Doom’s backstory made him the hunter that killed Bambi. Which, I mean, whoa.
It actually happened
Doom’s Red Car conspiracy? Buying up world-class public transit and replacing it with a freeway? Totally real. Well, mostly.
In the ‘40s, automotive companies banded together to buy out LA’s Pacific Electric Railway. And as soon as they did, they killed and buried it. Specifically under the LA freeway. What do you call a conspiracy that actually works?
This time, you call it “history”. The Red Car conspiracy sounds nefarious unless we rewind a little more. In 1900, nepo baby Henry Huntington took $15M and headed west to LA. He bought the Los Angeles Railway. Folded it into a new company he called Pacific Electric. So a gagillionaire owns a huge chunk of public infrastructure. For good, right? Of course not. Huntington spent the rest of his millions building suburbs outside LA. The guy used his trolley network to get the suburbanites he sold those houses to in and out of the city in shiny red compartments.
But once he’d made his return, Huntington stopped caring about the Red Car network. It got gross. Folks who could afford cars just took the roads, finding them faster anyway. In the ‘20s, LA faced a vote on whether to let a corporation keep running the Red Cars. They voted against it. Over the next few decades, freeways and bus paths replaced the trolley network. ’61 saw the last voyage of a Red Car ever. You can take that final ride too if you want to:
Like a Rabbit Out of a Hat
Who Framed Roger Rabbit cost $51M to make. Disney CEO Eisner figured Roger was too sexy for families and pushed it out under Disney-for-grownups label Touchstone Pictures. Director Zemeckis, who’d clawed his way up the industry, had more than money riding on the movie—his reputation. So what did folks make of this weird flick?
Roger Rabbit opened on Wednesday, June 22, 1988. It made back 20% of its budget on that long weekend alone, finishing #1 at the box office. Broke Disney’s own records for an opening at the time. Roger Rabbit went on to rake in $154M in the US for an international total of $352M. Only Rain Man made more more that year. Pretty good for a rabbit picture.
Critics loved it too. You can file Roger Rabbit under “Universal Acclaim”. Even hard-to-please reviewer Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four. Folks spent less wordcount waxing on about specific aspects. Their reviews agreed—it works as a symphonic moviegoing experience. Writing for The Washington Post, Desson Thomson called it “a definitive collaboration of pure talent.” He went on to say that "Zemeckis had Walt Disney Pictures' enthusiastic backing, producer Steven Spielberg's pull, Warner Bros.'s blessing, Canadian animator Richard Williams' ink and paint, Mel Blanc’s voice, Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman's witty, frenetic screenplay, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, and Bob Hoskins' comical performance as the burliest, shaggiest private eye.” Did you know that guy wrote speeches for Obama?
Thomson was right. Roger Rabbit’s not great because of any one thing. A whole galaxy of stars aligned under the force of will of a few folks who were probably a huge pain to work with but never let up. Probably why this won four Oscars in technical categories.
For a few years, Who Framed Roger Rabbit doiminated culture and merchandizing. But as time went on, we left the rabbit back in Toontown. I never hear anybody talk about it anymore. Maybe because the race critque lands harder now. Maybe because it gets lost in streaming libraries. Maybe it’s just too horny. I dunno. But we should still be talking about the Roger Rabbit Spielberg and Zemeckis managed to pull out of Walt Disney’s hat.
Is it Chinatown→? Sort of. Less of a rip-off, more of a send-up. But Chinatown→ and Who Framed Roger Rabbit make a really great Double Feature. Hope you enjoyed this one!
Psst, share this one with a friend! Bet they’ve never seen Roger Rabbit, or haven’t in a couple decades. Show ‘em what they’re missing!
Notes
Screenwriting duo Price and Seaman would go on to pen such timeless gems as Wild Wild West (’99) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (’00). Yikes.
Animator Richard Williams was also responsible for the cartoon intros to the Pink Panther films.
What’s silly for us is serious for our characters, like how Eddie’s brother was killed. But what’s silly for our characters, like Judge Doom being a toon, is traumatic for us.
Delores was the replicant in Blade Runner.
Anatomically implausible figure aside, Jessica Rabbit’s face is definitely drawn to look like Faye Dunaway’s down to the eyebrows.
Roger Rabbit’s jazz soundtrack is seemingly intentionally similar to Chinatown’s.
Space Jam (’96) is Roger Rabbit but to sell basketball shoes.
Saturday morning cartoons were animated on threes and fours for cheapness, which meant only 8 or 6 frames per second. Shameful.