It's been at least 15 or 16 years since I've sat down and watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit all the way through. Not because I thought it was a bad film. I was blown away when I first saw it in the theaters back in 1988. However, I think a combination of watching my old VHS copy to death as well as the inevitable onslaught of Who Framed Roger Rabbit merchandise and subsequent theatrical shorts released by Disney that paled in comparison to the original wore me out for a while.
Over the years I've watched snippets. Either on television or when they would show (repeatedly) on Cartoon Network. But I hadn't sat down and watched it all the way though since I was a gawky teen. Years before I would become a gawky adult.
Until a couple nights ago. I had bought it on DVD a year or so back but haven't made the time to sit down and watch it.
I feel the movie has aged pretty good. Sometimes movies don't age very well because either the story or the humor is stuck in a certain time period or the special effects become extremely dated. Roger Rabbit still impresses me. The combination of live action and animation was not only innovative for it's time but I find it innovative even now.
It wasn't the first movie to do this. There had been several before it. However, it was really the first film to combine the two and make it believable. The attention to detail right down to the filmmakers going to great lengths to make it looks as though the actors were looking right at the animated characters.
A lot of films made either before or after Roger Rabbit, it's obvious the actors were not even looking at the characters. And to this date I don't think a film has surpassed what the filmmakers achieved with Roger Rabbit.
My least favorite artist/animator on the planet Ralph Bakshi attempted a more grittier and adult live action/animation called Cool World about a couple years later in 1990 was met to a very poor reception.
While an audience found the innuendo's of Jessica Rabbit playing "Pattycake" with Toontown's human owner Marvin Acme to be cute (because that's pretty much all they were doing), audiences and critics seemed less than enthused about the idea of human's and toons having relations.
Or perhaps they were less than enthused about the thought of having relations with Kim Basinger either in human or toon form. Who knows.
Although, truth be told, the original novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary K. Wolf which the film was based on was pretty dark and less than family friendly.
With cartoons almost completely done on the computer nowadays, I really see a film like Roger Rabbit being done nowadays. Sure, you can still do a live action/animated film with computer. And probably quicker than Roger Rabbit was produced (three years of production).
But I feel it loses that warm and quality you can only get from drawn animation and hand painted cels.
I'll be honest with you all. I hope they don't make a sequel to Roger Rabbit. There are some films that were just the right movie for the right time. I feel that Roger Rabbit is one of those movies. And if they were to try and recapture that magic, it would just come off a little paler than the original.
2 comments:
I read Wolfe's "anti-sequel", Who Plugged Roger Rabbit, which tried to incorporate the film's interpretation and mish-mash it with the first book, even though the Jessica of the books is clearly unfaithful and it deals with even more social issues/adult themes within the toons-in-the-real-world setting(humans marrying toons and having children, humans turning into toons, toons turning into humans, etc..)
Robert Zemeckis has wanted to do a sequel for decades. I imagine if they got around to it, they would set it in a later period, probably the late 70s or mid-80s, when old cartoons from the past were being sold on videotape and the emergence of video games - there is room for a lot of things. Maybe they could include the Hanna-Barbera characters.
The late 60's or early 1970's might work. Especially considering how the classic cartoon characters were being replaced by television animation. It might be interesting to see characters from UPA, Hanna-Barbera and Filmation interacting with many of the characters from the golden age of animation.
It would be difficult to replicate the feel of that time period. Especially since many of the voice talents of that time have long since passed on. They can be imitated yes. But it just doesn't have the same feel of the original with Mel Blanc doing most of the voices of his classic characters with the exception of a couple.
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