Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Entry updated 28 April 2025. Tagged: Film.
US live-action/animated film (1988). Warner / Touchstone (Disney) / Amblin. (See The Walt Disney Company.) Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Animation director: Richard Williams (uncredited). Producers: Frank Marshall and Robert Watts. Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S Seaman, remotely influenced by a Robert Towne project (for Chinatown see below), loosely based upon Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981) by Gary K Wolf. Special effects by Industrial Light & Magic. Cast includes Joanna Cassidy, Bob Hoskins, Stubby Kaye, Christopher Lloyd, Mae Questel and Alan Tilvern. Voice cast includes Mel Blanc, Charles Fleischer, Lou Hirsch, Amy Irving, Kathleen Turner (uncredited) and Richard Williams. 104 minutes. Colour.
Private eye Eddie Valiant (Hoskins) has turned to drink since the murder of his brother, reportedly by a Toon, one of the animated characters who co-exist and work with humans in this Alternate-World 1947 Hollywood, while leasing the seemingly-safe Polder called Toontown, where they live in peace, safe from anti-Toon prejudice [for Polder and Toons see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] (see also Race in SF). Another Toon, Roger Rabbit (Fleischer) – co-star in Maroon Cartoons' series of animated shorts starring Baby Herman (Hirsch) – is fluffing his lines, distracted by his suspicion that his wife Jessica (speaking voice Turner; singing voice Irving) has become involved with the owner of Toontown, Marvin Acme (Kaye). Valiant, who has become a confirmed Toon-hater, reluctantly accepts a commission from studio boss R K Maroon (Tilvern) to dog Jessica and capture her indiscretions on film, with the intention of shocking Roger out of his anxiety. Valiant takes some marginally indiscreet photographs, but then Acme is murdered, leaving Roger the chief suspect. Judge Doom (Lloyd), a sadist mysteriously given control over all matters Toonish, pronounces Roger guilty without trial and declares the rabbit will be, on apprehension, fatally dissolved in a fluid called The Dip, a poison which overrides Toons' normal cartoonish, Shapeshifter immunity. Meanwhile Acme's will – reportedly leaving the Toontown to the Toons – has gone missing. Valiant's girlfriend Dolores (Cassidy) tells him that a combine called Cloverleaf Industries is buying up great swathes of property, including Toontown, for undisclosed purposes; if Acme's will is not found by midnight, Toontown will fall to Cloverleaf.
Aided by the Toon taxi Benny the Cab (Fleischer), Valiant pursues Jessica into Toontown where he encounters a cornucopia of historical animated characters – Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny (Blanc), Daffy Duck (Blanc), Droopy Dog (Williams), Porky Pig (Blanc), Betty Boop (Questel) and many more – and is shot at by Judge Doom, now revealed as the true Villain behind Cloverleaf, whose plan is to buy up current tram lines – as seen in very many silent films made in Hollywood – and strategic sites like Toontown, in order to create a great network of freeways, complete with malls, to be opened around 1950: the year a very similar operation succeeded in the real world, helping transform Los Angeles into a car city (see Transportation). Captured by Doom and his weasel/bent-cop sycophants the Toon Patrol, Valiant and Jessica prepare for death. Doom's plan is mass murder – to spray all Toontown with The Dip, erasing it from the face of the Earth – but Valiant uses trickster means to sabotage this plot, dissolve Doom (who turns out to be a self-hating Toon), and to save Toontown, and our heroes, and the still-clement City.
The screenwriter Robert Towne (1934-2024) may or may have not actually hoped to write a thematic sequel to his script for Chinatown (1974) directed by Roman Polanski (1933- ), which would follow the earlier film's dissection of California's deeply corrupt water wars with an assault on the suicide by car of the old Los Angeles after 1950; The Two Jakes (1990) directed by Jack Nicholson (1937- ) with its analysis of the oil industry would have closed off this trilogy. Whatever Towne's speculative intentions may have been, and though they are in a sense immaterial, the savage underlying poignance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is inevitably haunted by that non-existent trilogy, with its message that California has been lost.
More conventionally, Roger Rabbit has become a landmark in the history of animated films – a glance at the credits list above is evidence of that – and may even be regarded as a culmination of the second phase of that genre (if the first is taken as having ended with the integration of colour and sound). The interaction between live and animated characters is masterfully handled; Williams's team, using largely traditional animation techniques, achieved an effect so commonplace in live-action movies that it usually goes unnoticed, but rare in animated movies, that of allowing the camera to roam rather than be fixed, and thus the principal animated characters have a realism and solidity to match their live counterparts. But technical considerations should not outdazzle the fact that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is among the Cinema's most significant achievements in the sphere of Fantasy. The heart of this Instauration Fantasy [for this and Fairies below see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] is an exploration of the relationship between two worlds, one haunted by manifest if unspoken reality and the other belonging to myth and Magic: we can make a direct analogy, reading the Toons as fairies in Technofantasy guise (and, by definition, capable of such fairy-like feats as Shapeshifting), between the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (beneath its convoluted, Chandleresque surface story) and the situations depicted in classic fairytales. Science-fictionally the Toons might be viewed as Avatars of human, Uploaded or AI personalities.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit won multiple Oscars and was recognized by the sf community with a BSFA Award as best media production and a Hugo as best dramatic presentation. The novelization, necessary because the storyline is so different (and, it must be said, improved) from Gary K Wolf's original novel, is Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) by Martin Noble (1947- ). [JGr/DRL/JC]
see also: The Happytime Murders.
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