All that and not one P-p-please.

May 28, 2020 4:55 PM

An oral history of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (sli09).
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd (21 comments total)

Smile, darn ya, smile...

My favorite movie! A joke or line from this film pops into my head at least once a week, no exaggeration. I used the Maroon Cartoon intro music as my phone ringtone for years. It's truly a masterpiece. I feel not enough is said about the soundtrack which does an amazing job walking the line between noir and cartoon music.

Disney made a few old-style Roger Rabbit shorts (in the same vein as the one that opens the movie) that are absolutely worth checking out. I'm sure they're on YouTube. There's also very impressive behind the scenes footage out there of all the little robots and things they built to get the effect of the toons holding physical objects.
posted by potrzebie at 5:31 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Wait, what? Richard Williams died?!

I met him years ago and have a signed book by him. He was an incredible animator and font of knowledge. His work on Roger Rabbit is great, but if you really want to see Williams at his best, track down The Thief and the Cobbler.

Belated .
posted by May Kasahara at 5:37 PM on May 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

I re-watch every few years and it still holds up so well. Considering that they were dealing with so many technical challenges, the thing that amazes me most is how incredibly well written it is. The plot is basically a lift of Chinatown but the characters are all so well fleshed out, the dialog is great and the storytelling is so economical and tight.
posted by octothorpe at 5:43 PM on May 28, 2020

If you want further detail, I suggest the 2019 book Pulling a rabbit out of a hat: the making of Roger Rabbit by Ross Anderson.
First couple chapters are a bit heavy on studio politics, but it does help set the scene. This was just before Little Mermaid ushered in the renaissance in Disney animation, so tensions were high. And the end of the book still came too soon & left me wanting further more.

BTW, YouTube has some early proof-of-concept tests with Paul Reubens (pre PeeWee Herman) voicing Roger.
posted by cheshyre at 7:17 PM on May 28, 2020

If they EVER do a sequel to WFRR, I would only BEG and PLEAD that they actually do it old school, and not CGI. There's a weightlessness to CGI that my brain reads in the uncanny valley, but WFRR was entirely believable to me because so much of it was actually done on film. It continues to be so on rewatchings even as CGI continues not to be ever.

Also somehow bringing up Ready Player One in this article was understandable but perhaps could have been skipped.
posted by hippybear at 7:30 PM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]

"Only when it was funny" was one of those primal hey-you-can-break-the-fourth-wall moments for young me.
posted by praemunire at 7:42 PM on May 28, 2020 [14 favorites]

I always got the sense that Roger Rabbit was fairly similar to other noir precisely because that gave them liberty to have a cartoon cast.

It's kind of weird, now that I'm an adult and have learned a bit about the politics of public transport, how Roger Rabbit, a movie about a detective and cartoon bunny, is actually a movie about a conspiracy to dismantle Los Angeles' extensive public transport system and condemn it to gridlock for generations. This is a popular conspiracy theory, it turns out (albeit usually masterminded by Detroit car manufacturers, not a murderous cartoon character) but sadly even that doesn't have a lot of truth to it: city planners made short-sighted decisions, encouraged by trendy modernist architects excited by the prospect of the car city without a thought for the logistics.
posted by Merus at 7:54 PM on May 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

My best plane flight ever was traveling with a good friend from university in Vancouver home to Toronto on winter break in 89/90. Apparently, a group booking had been cancelled, so it was just me, my friend and a couple of other bemused passengers along with the crew, and a lot of free drinks in a large plane. The movie was Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
posted by mollymillions at 9:00 PM on May 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

- . . - -
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:29 PM on May 28, 2020

. - !!!
posted by haemanu at 10:55 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I remember seeing it in a theater. The biggest reaction I can recall was when Droopy Dog showed up as an elevator operator late in the film. For me at least it was a great surprise to see a character I had more or less forgotten about.
posted by pmurray63 at 11:35 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

The biggest reaction I can recall was when Droopy Dog showed up as an elevator operator late in the film. For me at least it was a great surprise to see a character I had more or less forgotten about.

See also: Buster Keaton's (silent!) cameo toward the end of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. The Droopy cameo always kind of struck me as a slight homage to the IaMMMMW cameo.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:27 AM on May 29, 2020

The sequel could have a 'toon Frank Lloyd Wright as the evil mastermind framing Roger again.

Isn't that Blade Runner?
posted by srboisvert at 5:37 AM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

The opening of WFRR was just so brilliant, first making you think that you're just watching a cartoon short before the movie and then seamlessly going from that 100% animated short right into live action just blew my mind the first time I saw it.
posted by octothorpe at 8:37 AM on May 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

If you have Disney+ there's a cool extra documentary that might also be available elsewhere
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:03 AM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I saw WFRR in the theater one afternoon, and later that evening, dragged three of my friends to see it with me. I believe I saw it one more time in the theater. What a great movie.
posted by corvikate at 10:57 AM on May 29, 2020

There's a fanfic I read years ago (aha! found it) set in the WFRR universe in the present day, where classic 2D toons are struggling to compete with new digital toons. The story itself is a bit unecessarily grimdark in places, but the concept is actually really sound and there's a bunch of very good toon-logic gags.
posted by nonasuch at 11:08 AM on May 29, 2020

I loved this movie as a kid, and I want to show it to my kids, but a few scenes are actually a bit too intense--Christopher Lloyd's character "dipping" that shoe, and then the reveal at the end ("...he sounded. Just! Like! THIS!") would be too much for my 5-year-old, maybe even my 10-year-old.
posted by zardoz at 3:33 PM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I worked a night shift in a VHS duplication plant when the Rabbit went to video:

You could watch this film an infinite number of times, and find a new details every time.
posted by ovvl at 5:03 PM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nothing about the score? Silvestri?! I love the WFRR score. It sets the period, tells the story, and fits like a puzzle piece.

see: Valiant & Valiant
posted by those are my balloons at 9:10 PM on May 29, 2020

“Nose? That doesn’t rhyme with walls!” “No, but this does.” *swift kick*

There’s not a lot of pretty much perfect movies, but this is one of them. They pulled off all the cartoon characters that were in the film without making them look like gratuitous cameos. It’s been over 30 years, and yet it holds up flawlessly. While it’s not exactly a kids’ movie, plenty went to see it, but they made sure there were a lot of jokes that went way over their heads and yet cracked the adults up something fierce. I really don’t want a sequel, because this was rare gold and it should be left to stand on its own.
posted by azpenguin at 10:41 PM on May 30, 2020 [4 favorites]