![]() ![]() A computer-animated Roger Rabbit movie would be no kind of Roger Rabbit movie at all to a lot of fans.īut it isn’t just Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s technological sophistication and beauty that has not been matched. But the long-threatened sequel never materialized, in no small part because of the incredible cost and work entailed, but also because the original would be impossible to match, both creatively and in terms of cultural impact. In the years following the film’s zeitgeist-capturing success and ubiquity rumors swirled of a sequel, including a war-themed follow-up called The Toon Platoon, and lovingly animated, extremely expensive Roger Rabbit shorts, theatrically distributed like Disney and Warner Brothers shorts of yesteryear, kept these characters in the public circulation for a few years following Roger Rabbit’s release. It seems safe to assume that it will never be topped. Three decades on, Who Framed Roger Rabbit remains the gold standard. It turns out that the film represented such a dramatic evolutionary leap forward that nearly three and a half full decades later subsequent filmmakers never came close to matching Zemeckis’ instant classic in terms of combining live-action and animation, let alone topping it. Every scene works on its own while further fleshing out the film’s singular universe and relentlessly pushing the film’s exquisitely conceived plot forward.Īt the time of its release, Who Framed Roger Rabbit felt like an exhilarating new beginning, like the first in a series of films that would masterfully fuse the worlds of live action and cartoons. In that respect, Who Framed Roger Rabbit represented the best of the old and the best of the new, a gorgeously realized 1940s setting that’s also a dizzily inventive meditation on the 1940s via state-of-the-art, never-to-be-surpassed live-action/animation rooted in the artisanal history of hand-drawn animation.Ī spirit of free-floating anarchy defines the film even as every element has been designed and realized down to an almost molecular level. Zemeckis, ever the restless pioneer of onscreen technology, would later attempt a fusion of animation and live acting with Polar Express, which is certainly a notable animation milestone, albeit of the nightmare-inducing variety. In this world of smooth, impersonal digital landscapes, animated characters would share the screen with human beings plenty, in the 2010 Yogi Bear movie, for example, but the frequently sorry results inevitably lacked the artistry, warmth and humanity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s animated, live-action and animated/live-action worlds. Computer animation was the wave of the future. Who Framed Roger Rabbit captured animation at a crossroads the hand-drawn animation that gives the film much of its beauty and enduring power, the product of genius animators slaving away at their masochistic trade in pursuit, and realization, of perfection, was on its way out. It similarly did not hurt that Roger Rabbit reunited the Executive Producer with director Robert Zemeckis, whose similarly beloved Back to the Future he’d worked on a few years earlier. It’s doubtful a production as insanely, almost prohibitively expensive, not to mention complicated and time and labor-intense as this could have been made without the enthusiastic backing of Executive Producer Steven Spielberg, at the time perhaps the single most successful filmmaker in Hollywood and, consequently, also a man people are very eager to please. If, as its tagline famously bragged, Superman made you feel like a man could fly, then Who Framed Roger Rabbit made you believe that cartoons and human beings could co-exist in the real world and the reel world. It was the first live-action/animation hybrid to attain an unmistakable verisimilitude. Who Framed Roger Rabbit made it feel real. ![]() Disney had experimented with combining live-action and animation in movies like Mary Poppins, Song of the South and Bedknobs and Broomsticks but never with the sophistication and flair exhibited here.Ĭombining animation and live action had always felt a little like a stunt before, a novelty, something that could be sustained for a set-piece or two but was too costly, complicated and difficult to sustain for an entire film. ![]() Live-action characters and cartoons had co-existed onscreen before. Like similarly revolutionary but inferior films such as The Jazz Singer and The Birth of a Nation, it’s one of those milestones that single-handedly pushes an art form forward and expands the vocabulary and possibilities of film. When Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in 1988 it was rapturously received as a technological marvel, sure, but also as something approaching a miracle. ![]()
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