Who Framed Roger Rabbit

It would be appropriate to pair Soul with another story about a drawn character who has died but still seeks some sort of closure before he’s completely gone.

One of my favorite books of all time is Gary K. Wolf’s Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

It’s set in a world where human and comic strip characters live side-by-side, although, when the latter speak, it’s in the form of dialogue bubbles that dissolve soon afterwards.

In that world Roger Rabbit is a middlingly popular comic character, starring in a strip distributed by the DeGreasy brothers – Rocco and Dominic. Roger is not alone in his belief that he’d be more successful with bosses who give him better promotion and budgets, but what bothers him far more is Rocco’s ongoing sexual relationship with Roger’s humanoid (drawn to look like a person) ex-wife Jessica.

One night Rocco DeGreasy is found dead. Just hours later the rabbit is also found dead, felled by a similar gunshot. The easy explanation for the detectives is that Roger killed Rocco out of spite, and then Jessica killed Roger, partly to avenge Rocco but more to get back the valuable lamp artifact the ex-husband she hates got to keep after they split.

When a comic book character dies, though, they get to remain on Earth for another 48 hours, in a progressively dismembered state. Roger uses that time to work with private eye Eddie Valiant, hoping Eddie will prove both that Roger did not kill Rocco and that Jessica, whom Roger still loves dearly, did not kill Roger.

The book has almost nothing in common with the movie adaptation. Yet its leading to me discovering one of my favorite books provides yet another reason to love Who Framed Roger Rabbit to death (no pun intended)!

I remember being seven years old when this came out. Absolutely every child my age loved it.

The plot was too complicated for us to understand, but all that mattered was we got to enjoy Roger’s antics, with all sorts of other legendary cartoon characters popping up for laughs! Plus the animated characters who came from the book and weren’t named Roger – Jessica, Baby Herman, and Benny – are hilarious in their own right, Christopher Lloyd is such a creepy surreal villain, and none of the animated characters would have been as funny without the human straight man Eddie!

Wow. Bob Hoskins only got this part after several more famous people turned it down, but he was perfect! Watching the bonus features on the DVD, I realized how essential his acting was. We wouldn’t have been so invested in the movie if he didn’t convincingly pretend he was interacting with a rabbit that had mass and was moving. That was particularly hard considering there was often nothing there – Hoskins would be pantomiming, and Roger and the other characters would later be animated on cells superimposed onto the live-action frames. Also, Hoskins deserves praise like Michael Caine in Muppet Christmas Carol, in that he takes the cartoon characters completely seriously without winking at the camera at all – except it’s even harder since he couldn’t so much as see them! It gets even more incredible in the last act, set in the cartoon characters’ home community of “Toontown”, where Hoskins has to amplify his reactions to everything like a cartoon character but still manages to convince us his feelings are real.

As the human protagonist of the film, Eddie serves as an audience surrogate, interacting with the entertainingly manic cartoon protagonist Roger on our behalf. As a result of that, and how much I loved the movie, Bob Hoskins felt like family to me for a while. I remember early in 1993 asking my mom and older sister randomly what happened to Bob Hoskins, even though it had been less than two years since he was in Hook. Admittedly FAR from the greatest movie of all-time, but according to Hoskins still better than the movie of his that came out after I asked the question – Super Mario Bros. Apparently, he considers that the worst movie he ever did.

So clearly Hollywood didn’t always use Hoskins’ talent to the fullest – his only great roles outside of Who Framed Roger Rabbit came from his native Britain. That’s another thing – his performance as a gruff American was so perfect that I had no idea he was British until reading an Oscar history book and finding out that the year Paul Newman won the Academy Award for Best Actor all the pre-Oscar Best Actor awards had gone to “Britain’s Bob Hoskins”. In fact, when my mom once commented that although Paul Newman spent decades getting Oscar nominations before finally winning, the award he finally got was probably for merit and not sentiment. I said, “No, otherwise it would have gone to Bob Hoskins.” My mom was shocked as she asked whether I meant for Roger Rabbit and I laughed as I explained I meant for Mona Lisa.

Hoskins should have gotten recognized for Who Framed Roger Rabbit though. With all due respect to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Hoskins was even better. At the very least he should have gotten a nomination for Best Actor. I feel like if the movie came out a decade and a half later he could have gotten recognized, just like Johnny Depp did for a movie with the same demographics, Pirates of the Caribbean. Alas, after Who Framed Roger Rabbit the only other time Hoskins was even on the Oscar radar was for Best Supporting Actor for Mrs. Henderson Presents and he wasn’t nominated then either.

This movie itself didn’t get nearly the love it should have from the Academy. Although it won several minor awards, it got denied mere nominations for major awards. Even Best Screenplay, for which director Robert Zemeckis’s previous masterpiece, Back to the Future, at least got a much-deserved nomination.* It was certainly lauded by some critics though. Roger Ebert called it the best movie of 1988, while his critiquing partner at the time Gene Siskel ranked it second, behind only The Last Temptation of Christ. The following year, when ranking best movies of the entire decade, Ebert placed Roger Rabbit second, only behind Do The Right Thing, while Siskel placed it seventh – and The Last Temptation of Christ didn’t even make that list!

Well, what’s so amazing about it besides Bob Hoskins, the funny cartoon characters, and the seamless interaction of humans and “toons”? That’s already a ton, but I’ll add the story to the list! The writers were inspired by Chinatown, a movie sharing all of Roger Rabbit’s excellence while none of its tone, and created a story about a different public good (transportation instead of water) being exploited for profit and leading to murder consequently. Yet they integrated the cartoon characters so deftly into a plot with homicides!

We start off with a hilarious Loony Tunes­-style cartoon starring Roger and Baby Herman, followed by the revelation that cartoon stars are just actors living in the world with the rest of us, and then Roger’s boss R.K. Maroon paying Eddie to get pictures of Toontown owner Marvin Acme (great reference to that name always turning up on products in Warner Bros. cartoons!**) together with Jessica, in an effort to get Roger upset by a wife who’s seemingly unfaithful (playing “Pattycake” with Acme!) Then Acme ends up dead thanks to an anvil dropped on him…and did the rabbit do it? This seems like a dark plot, and it is told with utter sincerity, yet the new characters as well as all the classic ones like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Betty Boop, Droopy, etc. manage to be just as hilarious and keep you in spirits just as high as ever!

That’s the thing with cartoon characters by and large – they have all the same emotions we do, but even when they’re upset they’re so over-the-top about it that it makes us laugh and gives us the feeling that everything’s going to be okay for all of us.

Eddie, his girlfriend Dolores, Marvin, R.K., and the other humans are so lucky to share a world with them. We’re so lucky to get to experience that world for a couple of hours. Later we got to experience the world at our convenience when Disney created “Mickey’s Toontown” in their theme parks but sadly any references to Roger were later removed due to licensing issues with Mr. Wolf.*** That also hasn’t helped as far as us never getting a sequel.

But, just like the movie references Chinatown, a classic set in the 40s, I am now going to reference Casablanca, a classic set AND made in the 40s.

We’ll always have Toontown.

Also, I’ll always have this terrific DVD of the movie signed by Roger’s actor, Charles Fleischer!

Bottom Line: Unparalleled movie magic.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to write below.

 

*When the Back to the Future trilogy first came out on DVD in 2002, there were issues on Part II with the framing of one scene as a result of shoddy conversion from the “pan and scan” print made for VHS to the anamorphic one made for DVD. Someone at DVDTalkForum.com made the hilarious observation that, since it was a Zemeckis film, the thread in which they were discussing this should be called “Who Incorrectly Framed Michael J. Fox?” In that one moment it hit me just how much RZ has contributed to cinema history!

**Also referenced in this Tiny Toon Adventures episode!

***Ha, there’s a great cartoon character name.