Review: Limited Run
Who Framed Roger Rabbit | Robert Zemeckis | USA | 1988 | 104 min
Union South Marquee Theater, Friday, February 27 at 11:30pm; Saturday, February 28 at 11:30 pm»
Taylor Hanley revisits the classic that pushed late-1980s film technology to seamlessly fuse live-action and animation.
I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit many times as a kid and there are a handful of scenes that I have vividly held onto. These scenes play so bizarrely in my memory that I believed that my imagination must have exaggerated the experience as time has passed. When I re-watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for the first time in my adult life, I found that those moments that I remembered are just as hilarious and insane as I had remembered them. But there were aspects of the film that I didn’t grasp at the time, like the heavy use of film noir conventions, the sexual innuendos, and the thinly-veiled references to racial segregation.
I remembered the opening Looney Toons-style “Maroon Cartoon” starring a baby and a rabbit where the rabbit gets severely hurt. The rabbit is on baby-sitting duty but the baby gets himself into trouble while climbing the kitchen for the cookie jar. The baby ignites the stove and flings knives in the direction of the rabbit. When a refrigerator drops on the rabbit’s head, a voice yells ‘Cut!’ indicating that this is all taking place on film set. The baby is a cigar-smoking, deep voice actor, Baby Herman, and the rabbit is our hero, Roger Rabbit. Roger has blown another take, and the Maroon Cartoon studio is worried that Roger’s wife, Jessica, has become a distraction for him. Studio head R.K. Maroon hires private detective (and toon-hater) Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) to investigate Jessica to prove to Roger that she’s no good.
I also remembered Eddie’s introduction to Jessica in her scandalous night club performance. The bouncer of the club is a gigantic monkey, the waiters are penguins and the act that Eddie walks in on is a piano duel between Daffy and Donald Duck. When Jessica enters the spotlight to sing Peggy Lee’s “Why Don’t You Do Right”, all men run to the edge of the stage and start to drool. Afterwards, Eddie secretly snaps photos of Jessica playing ‘Patty Cake’ with Marvin Acme, the owner of “Toontown,” where all the Toons live when they’re not at the studio.
When I was a child, I didn’t appreciate how brilliant the combination of film noir and animation was, juxtaposing the extreme differences of the two. The film takes place in Hollywood in 1947. Eddie is a private detective who has a drinking problem and is broke. The themes of murder, sex and alcohol are constant throughout the entire film. But despite the obvious adult humor, the film is never vulgar or crude. The film also heavily relies on tropes of classic cartoons, like exaggerated facial expressions, eyes popping out of heads, and even people getting severely hurt but instantly recovering without a scratch. This unique combination makes the film enjoyable for everyone.