Originally posted at the DL May 2016
Ahh man. This movie. Let's talk the technical bits first. There are very few movies animated with the level of detail the toons in Roger Rabbit are. A recurring fact I bring up when we revisit Disney is their tendency to sink ridiculous time and effort into things the average viewer won't notice.
The film industry refers to this as the Roger Rabbit Effect, because they bloody well should name it after this movie.
What's easy to forget is that there's this much thought and detail into the entire movie, not just the animation.
I mean, the movie's entire first act is just one day. Eddie drinks in every single scene in it. They only draw attention to it in some of them. This dude does not give a fuck, he's entirely too drunk to have any fucks left to give. And you don't get to forget that.
That sort of conspicuous detail is all over. The arrangement of the glory days photos and newspapers is carefully arranged to reference later scenes. The layers of dust on Teddie's desk are correctly manipulated when Roger interacts with them. Christopher Lloyd does not blink and only moves at sharp angles.
This is one of the secrets really. It is a work of love. How does the audience respond except with love?
The rest of course is that all that detail works with the sort of story it is. It's a noir-ish mystery punctuated by hi-jinks and with a distinct undercurrent of war-era race relations. It's an epic bow to all the great characters and animators of the golden age of cartoons. The meticulous detail and overt fanboyistic background events are all there to service the story and lead the audience through all the twists. Of course Doom is the villain, nobody's surprised about that. But then it turns out he's not even human and oh god that explains everything doesn't it? Of course Eddie's a detective for toons, he's a retired police officer who was raised in the circus.
And of course, I don't want to diminish the more blatant crowd pleasers. The piano duel between Daffy and Donald is magnificent. Saying to hell with it, we'll guarantee Mickey and Bugs get equal screentime by always having them on screen together makes Bugs' gags work; Mickey setting him up for punchlines is a stroke of brilliance.
One of the features on the bluray is that entire sequence side by side with Bob Hoskins on the blue screen. I really recommend it, because it drives home how amazing he really was in this. He has to go through a series of wire falls, tumbles, and all this, have dialogue with four different characters, interact with rooms... 100% of which are animated and only one of which (the flagpoll he grabs) has a prop to work with. It's him wandering around a mostly empty set and having one sided conversations with voices that were dubbed in later. It's tremendous.
It feels a little incomplete to cover Roger Rabbit and not talk about Jessica but... I dunno. The movie's really very upfront with who she is as a character, while being just ambiguous enough that the audience has that hint of doubt. But I guess owning herself like that is rare enough that it's enough, maybe.
Rating- 9/10. Maybe a teensy bit high, but yeah, few films nostalgia bomb me quite as hard as this one.
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