Against All Odds, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a Masterpiece

I grew up on Looney Tunes, so I’m getting swept up in the hype for Coyote vs. Acme, and let me tell you, if that movie is even an ounce as good as Who Framed Roger Rabbit then we’re in for a good time.

Not only is Who Framed Roger Rabbit the best live-action cartoon movie ever made (there isn’t a lot of competition in this category, sorry Space Jam), it’s also one of the best films of all time, and it only became a landmark because of a handful of things that had no business going right.

Everybody’s Here

Somebody looked at the entire history of American animation and said let’s grab every character ever made and put them into one film together… Super Smash Bros. style.

That’s a nightmare to clear legally, and it nearly didn’t happen. Spielberg got involved and talked Warner Bros. into lending Bugs Bunny to a Disney movie. The one condition was that Bugs couldn’t share a frame with Mickey unless the two of them got exactly equal screen time, same deal with Donald and Daffy dueling it out at the piano. This is like a kids version of the DeNiro and Pacino diner scene in Heat… to this day, it’s still the only time Looney Tunes and Disney characters ever shared a scene.

A New Star

You’d figure the obvious move is to center everything on a famous cartoon character, but the popular toons get reduced to cameos so we got Roger Rabbit instead, a brand new character created just for this movie.

Roger is hilarious, everything from the fit to his voice… he’s one of our great movie stars and I’m fairly sure I built part of my own personality as a kid on him: the class clown who gets laughs by hurting himself, dumb and clumsy on purpose. The film’s best running joke is that this goofy walking disaster is somehow married to the hottest women in Hollywood and everyone assumes she’s the lucky one! She loves him because he’s funny, a great life lesson for all of us, no wonder I acted like him as a kid.

Playing It Completely Straight

The lazy version of this movie would attempt to explain why toons and humans live together, but this film doesn’t waste your time on any exposition. Instead it just drops you into this world of toons and humans living with different laws of physics and never explains any of it.

That frees up the movie to focus on an actual detective story which amounts to Chinatown with cartoon characters. Eddie Valiant is the burnt-out private eye, Roger is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and Jessica Rabbit is the sexy femme fatale… I was seven when this movie came out and I’m pretty sure the moment she walked out on that stage is when I realized I liked girls.

Bob Hoskins

Let me get to the point: Bob Hoskins deserved an Oscar for this performance. The man was acting against absolutely nothing years before Jar Jar or Gollum. Hoskins prepared for the role by training his brain to hallucinate cartoons… it worked so well that even after filming he kept seeing characters pop out in real life.

His Eddie Valiant has an exasperated energy and the chemistry he builds with Roger turns the film into a genuine buddy comedy. The handcuff gag, where Roger slips his hands free when Valiant stops sawing because he “could’ve done that at any time,” is one of my all-time favorite movie jokes, and it only works because Hoskins already sold you on their relationship… he’s the reason you believe in Roger as a real character.

It’s insane to look at the long list of actors who passed on the role: Harrison Ford, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Martin… Maybe couple of these guys can pull it off, but I can’t picture it. This is one of those roles nobody else gets to own, Hoskins made it his.

All Done Without CGI (!)

None of the film works without the actual craft behind the illusion of humans and cartoons living together. The live-action was shot on VistaVision cameras, giving the animators a much larger canvas to work on. Every frame was then printed as a black-and-white photo and all the toons were drawn in, frame-by-frame. And they didn’t stop at the characters, for every single frame, they hand-drew the shadows so that the cartoons would actually catch light and cast shadows like everything else in the shot. No computer animation touched this movie and it’s a big part of why the effects still look convincing today.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit had no right to be this good:

1. It needed legal agreements from rival studios

2. It needed to build the whole movie around a brand new character

3. It needed a tight script that never tried to explains its silly premise

4. It needed talented actors and animators that could sell you on the illusion

I’ll be happy with Coyote vs. Acme as long as it’s a good comedy, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit set an insanely high bar… it’s a masterpiece.

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