WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT

by Kevin Koehler

Who needs a car in L.A.?  We got the best public transportation system in the world.

- Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), Who Framed Roger Rabbit

It might seem strange to see Mickey Mouse in a film in which a cigar-smoking baby, pondering a woman's shapely posterior, laments "My problem is I got a fifty-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky."  A movie where a busty lounge singer cavorts in her changing room with a business tycoon, their indiscretions prefaced with her condition: "This time, take off that hand-buzzer." 

Relax, it's just patty-cake.

In one of Who Framed Roger Rabbit's many animated cameos, Betty Boop makes an appearance as a sexy nightclub waitress, hawking cigarettes, reminding one just how provocative Americans cartoons used to be during their Golden Age (a period generally agreed to have begun in 1928, continuing until the mass acquiescence to television in the 1950s).  Before video games and rap lyrics turned our nation's youth into cold-blooded killers, there was Steamboat Willie's sadism and the transvestism of Bugs Bunny.  You'd be tempted to call these risque depictions of sexuality and cartoon violence unsuitable for children, albeit our distinctly modern construct of childhood as a privileged time in human existence (the Garden of Boyhood), free from responsibility, bills, and broken hearts, a fellowship whose members must be protected from the social ills of grown-ups at all costs.  It's no wonder so much pop culture trades in callow juvenilia and infantilization, endeavoring to keep us children our entire lives: there's a part of us that would like to be.

I imagine Robert Zemeckis wouldn't mind returning to the days of yesteryear, given how consumed with nostalgia so many of his pictures are - Back to the Future, The Polar Express, Forrest Gump, and of course, Who Framed Roger Rabbit to name just a few.  It comes with some irony that the director has frequently found himself at the forefront of film technologies via these very same pictures.  Zemeckis is no Luddite, instead using the special effects of the present to reimagine history as a tangible place, one he could visit in a stainless steel DeLorean, play t-ball with his childhood chums, and tell the pretty girl who rejected him that the awkward boy became a famous Hollywood filmmaker worth millions.  Nostalgia is a powerful force of imagination, especially when informed by affection or revenge - to create heroes of our friends and ourselves, villains of those who did us wrong.

It's Hollywood, 1947.  The hero of Roger Rabbit is Eddie Valiant, an archetypical policeman-turned-private eye given to drink and unpaid debts (not so archetypical: he's a former circus clown).  He used to be a friend to the "Toon" community - a collection of (literally) animated contract players exploited by Tinseltown for our amusement - until the day one of them killed his brother.  By dropping a piano on his head.  Cartoon actors may be cute, even lovable, seemingly gone to frolic and mirth, but (at least according to Valiant) inside lurks the heart of a murderer.  Echoes of Chinatown, after Valiant is engaged under false pretense to take photos of an adulterous spouse, an eccentric, gag factory mogul (Stubby Kaye in his last film appearance) ends up dead by means of the Toon signature means of earthly dispatch: dropping heavy objects on people from great height.  The police are quick to pin the blame on cuckolded husband Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer), but Valiant becomes convinced the animated star has been framed.  Together, detective and rabbit evade the corrupt Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), his ink-and-paint enforcers, and search for a missing will that may or may not hold all the answers.

Technically-speaking, Roger Rabbit really is a landmark cinematic achievement.  Its blending of live action and hand-drawn animation is remarkably fluid, representing something of a quantum leap from previous, high-profile attempts at man/cartoon cohabitation - Song of the South, Pete's Dragon and the like (the budget was $70 million, making it the most expensive film of the 1980s).  Actors rarely feel like they are interacting with blank space, a puppet, or a man in a rabbit suit (as Hopkins frequently had to during the film's production).   Even as they are bouncing off walls and otherwise defying the laws of physics, the Toons possess a peculiar, unexpected humanness, deriving empathy for what is essentially a moving illustration.  There is a certain existential horror to be had watching the death of an animated shoe; such is the magic of movie-making.  It's no coincidence that this film resuscitated Hollywood's dormant feature animation divisions, starting with the House that Mickey Built.  Disney, the studio behind Roger Rabbit, followed it with an impressive run of commercial animated hits that harkened back to Walt's Golden Age of the '30s and '40s: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, culminating with 1994's The Lion King, the highest grossing non-CGI animated picture of all time.

This being said, it's the successful synthesis of film noir and animation that's the greater miracle.  Roger Rabbit is a self-proclaimed story of greed, sex, and murder - the traditional hard-boiled stuff of Cain and Chandler - but set in some bizarre simulacrum of 1940s Los Angeles where humans live alongside cartoon characters, the relationship between them not unlike apartheid.  A profoundly ridiculous premise, surely, but it works, not only as story and special effects showcase, but satire of the filmic conventions of two genres seemingly left to history's waste bin.  A couple of other things dug up from the past: Hollywood's inequitable contract system and the decline of Los Angeles public transportation, a pair of unlikely subjects for what is ostensibly a kid's movie.  But maybe kids and their movies are capable of more than we think.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.