Summer of Netflix Day 66 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Jason:  When I try to recall the scariest movie scenes I ever remember watching as a kid, this movie always comes to mind. The scene at the end when Christopher Lloyd is melting in the acid, his eyes fall out, his skin drops away, and the twisted, murderous Toon is revealed made my skin crawl. In fact, it still does. That is a truly disturbing scene! And then he gets flattened! My nightmares of these images were vivid. But that wasn’t the only take away from this film. Roger Rabbit was groundbreaking in its treatment of actors interacting with non-physical characters. Sure it had been done before by Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, several others really, but never on such an enormous scale! And it set the stage for everything that has come out in the last 10-15 years. In today’s movies where there is a character that isn’t physically on set, there is usually a guy in a costume that will be edited out later. Or there is a head on a stick, or something equally physical. I’ve read that when filming this movie, all they had was a life-sized rubber statue of Roger and the voice actor, off camera, dressed in a full Roger costume reading lines. No joke. And all the live actors really nail talking to the fictitious creatures. It was the first of its kind. Another thing that really strikes me as wonderful is the sheer number of cartoon characters on screen. This was a Disney film, so Mickey, Donald, Goofy, even Dumbo make sense. But then you have Bugs and Daffy, Porky Pig, Betty Boop, Droopy. All of these characters that were not owned by Disney bopping along right beside their cartoon competitors. As an artist and self-proclaimed cartoon aficionado, it truly warms my heart.

Joel: Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a good movie to end on. It was one that, like many people, I saw when I was a kid and I knew based on the near universal praise that the movie got that it would hold up and be just as good as I remembered it being as a kid. But actually, it’s quite better than that. When I was a kid, it was a good example of how cartoons were awesome, but live action movies were starting to be ok as well, given the right circumstances. Today, it’s so much better. The fact that the whole movie is a noir never occurred to tiny Joel who didn’t know what a film noir was. And the comment about the high quality of LA’s public transportation? Perfect. I want to take a moment to really call out Bob Hoskins for his work here. It is hard for actors to act with a character that isn’t really there. It’s hard for actors today who learned the craft in a CGI heavy world, so it must have been near impossible for an actor to act alongside cartoons that would be inserted later. There are a few occasions in this movie where someone isn’t quite looking into a cartoon character’s eyes. But Bob Hoskins, who has to act with cartoon characters more than any other actor on the screen nails it every single time. You’d think the actual toon characters were on set. That is good acting in a difficult setting and Hoskins rises to the challenge perfectly.

Chris: In the list of movies that work both for kids and adults, Who Framed Roger Rabbit belongs towards the top. I remember watching this multiple times as a kid and really had no idea what the actual movie was about seeing as how I was an infant when it came out. As an adult, watching the movie is just as much of a joy now that I, you know, understand plot and character and so on. Space Jam will go down as the greatest movie that combined cartoons and live-action, but I think it’s easy to say that WFRR paved the way for Space Jam. And yes, Christopher Lloyd terrified the crap out of me as a child because of this movie.