Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

“I grew up watching ‘Who framed Roger Rabbit’. It’s easy to underestimate it, to expect silly slapstick rather than the clever pastiche of hardboiled noir detective fiction that you get – mixed up with numerous clever cartoon references. It’s a wonderful film with a great central story, but real laughs are still to be had seeing Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny sharing the screen (in an excessively equal way that has become somewhat notorious). The Donald vs. Daffy piano duel is still comedy gold…even if they’ll never convince me Donald says ‘nitwit’.” - Dec 9 2003.

There’s not really a whole lot more to say about Roger Rabbit, the 1988 milestone for comedy animation. It may seem commonplace to reimagine childish things in a serious way these days, but Roger Rabbit’s cynical and gritty melding of two very different worlds is pure brilliance – and executed superbly. Not only did it treat cartoons in a way that was at once affectionate and mocking, it helped Disney revive from its major slump and produce the string of hit films of my childhood. It has also proved enduringly iconic: the Jessica Rabbit character is instantly recognisable to, I suspect, almost the whole of the English-speaking world, and considerably further than that too.

Somehow, it also gives me quite a thrill that Disney did all the animation here – albeit mostly hired hands in Elstree rather than the core American teams (for more on that point, see my entry on The Thief and the Cobbler). The idea of Disney artists animating Warner’s Buggs and Daffy, or Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop somehow makes an animation fan like me strangely pleased. Very nearly every major Golden Age cartoon character appears (although there is a gaping lacuna where Tom and Jerry ought to be, whose animators after all pioneered the whole ‘animation and live action’ thing…well, not counting the Alice Comedies and various other early shorts…), but probably the best thing about it is that at its centre, it is not a cartoon, it’s a silly detective mystery with Bob Hoskins at the centre of it somehow making a great American private eye, and the cartoons just happen to be the gimmick that fills out the edges.

Nothing is quite like Roger Rabbit, but nothing needs to be. We already have Roger Rabbit, so what more would we need?