Amazingly done - Who Framed Roger Rabbit Reviews

A rule was set when live action and animation were first combined: Don?t move the camera. Why, you may ask? There are several reasons. When the camera moves, the animators must also change the toons dimensions according to the camera movement, whether closer or farther. To say the least, the animators were lazy. Spielberg picked up the project and gave it to Zemeckis, whose was proving himself to be a strong director with Gremlins, Back to the Future, and others. Spielberg was the executive producer on the film, and sat and watched the ride. The ride was a three year picture. Over a year alone was spent drawing in the characters in Post-Production, which had many layers, including shadows, colors, expressions, etc. And the end result is fantastic. Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes place during 1947 in Hollywood, where toons work with humans and inhabit their own town, Toon Town. The setup is that Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) has killed Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), the creator of the Toons, Toon Town, and series of gags like the hand buzzer, ?Our best selling product,? he exclaims. Apparently Acme played patty cake with Roger?s wife, Jessica (voice of Kathleen Turner), and Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) took pictures of it, driving Roger crazy. If you understood that, you?d see it?s the perfect setup. Roger Rabbit is also somewhat of a homage to old film-noirs. Valiant?s Private Eye company is named Valiant & Valiant, like in Maltese Falcon, which had the last names of the detectives as their company name. Also Valiant, like Sam Spade, loses a partner. The diffference is Spade does not mourn and remains firm, while Valiant?s lose causes him to be stiff. There are other things too. Valiant hops a ride on the back of a trolley, which supposedly takes it?s passengers to Sunset Blvd. The movie is a combination of three things. The first is it is a live action movie, a story. The second is it?s a full-length animated feature. The third is that it is a special effects show. And this whole movie was done without one computer. All the toons were drawn in by hand. There are scenes in which the toons are holding various real life objects. Baby Herman holds a real cigar he smokes, while the Toon Patrol (a gang of weasals) hold real machine guns and handguns. The objects were operated by either machines that were rigged to copy the movement of someone else, or by puppeteers. Then there was the camera movement. The animators had to draw different dimensions for the toons, making them change shape and size constantly. This is probably the only movie to do that. Think about it. In Space Jam, a copy cat, Michael Jordan spends all of the tim in front of a blue screen acting with imaginary characters, but Bugs Bunny and the rest of the gang never really enter the real world (except in one scene where they take something from Jordan?s house). Roger Rabbit is also a combination of many different things. His clothes are colored similar to the American Flag, he has the cheeks of Bugs Bunny, the yellow gloves Mickey Mouse wore in the 40s, and Goofy?s pants. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a beautifully realized movie that will go down as the first movie to fully combine live action and animation seamlessly into a story. It?s surprising to know that at the first test screening of Roger Rabbit, everyone walked out in the first three minutes. Probably because their audience consisted only of 18 year olds with their dates and the opening three minutes is a cartoon short in which Roger Rabbit runs around a kitchen while Baby Herman knocks things over in his desire for a cookie. They left before it is revealed that Roger screws up and a director yells, ?Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut!? Each screening got better and better, and soon Roger Rabbit was the biggest hit of the summer of 1988. I would recommend this movie to anybody. The combination of action, story, animation, and whatnot is superb. Bob Hoskins is especially good, since most of his lines are projected into thin air at nothing (until the toons are added). He should have received the Academy Award for Best Actor.