I stopped off at a hot dog stand before the screening of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,”

and ran into a couple of the other local movie critics. They said they were going to the
same screening. I asked them what they’d heard about the film. They said they were
going to see it for the second time in two days. That’s the kind of word of mouth money
can’t buy.

And “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is the kind of movie that gets made once in a blue
moon, because it represents an immense challenge to the filmmakers: They have to
make a good movie while inventing new technology at the same time.
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Like “2001,” “Close Encounters” and “E.T.,” this movie is not only great entertainment
but a breakthrough in craftsmanship - the first film to convincingly combine real actors
and animated cartoon characters in the same space in the same time and make it look
real.

I’ve never seen anything like it before. Roger Rabbit and his cartoon comrades cast real
shadows. They shake the hands and grab the coats and rattle the teeth of real actors.
They change size and dimension and perspective as they move through a scene, and the
camera isn’t locked down in one place to make it easy, either - the camera in this movie
moves around like it’s in a 1940s thriller - and the cartoon characters look three-
dimensional and seem to be occupying real space.

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In a way, what you feel when you see a movie like this is more than appreciation. It’s
gratitude. You know how easy it is to make dumb, no-brainer action movies, and how
incredibly hard it is to make a movie like this, where every minute of screen time can
take days or weeks of work by the animators. You’re glad they went to the trouble.

The movie is a collaboration between Disney Studios and Steven Spielberg, the direction
is by Robert (“Back to the Future”) Zemeckis, and the animation is by Richard Williams.
They made this a labor of love.
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How did they do it? First, they plotted every scene, shot by shot, so that they knew
where the live actors would be, and where the animated characters would be. Then they
shot the live action, forcing actors such as Bob Hoskins, the star, to imagine himself in a
world also inhabited by cartoons (or “Toons,” as the movie calls them). Then they
laboriously went through the movie frame by frame, drawing in the cartoon characters.
This is not a computer job. Real, living animators did this by hand, and the effort shows
in moments like the zowie zoom shots where the camera hurtles at Roger Rabbit and
then careens away, with the rabbit changing size and perspective in every frame.
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But I’m making the movie sound like homework for a film class.
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is sheer, enchanted entertainment from the first frame to
the last - a joyous, giddy, goofy celebration of the kind of fun you can have with a movie
camera. The film takes place in Hollywood in 1947, in a world where humans and Toons
exist side by side. The Toons in the movie include not only new characters such as Roger
Rabbit and his wife, the improbably pneumatic Jessica, but also established cartoon
stars such as Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse and both of the great
ducks, Donald and Daffy (they do an act together as a piano duo).

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The Toons live in Toontown, a completely animated world where the climax of the
movie takes place, but most of the time, they hang out in a version of Hollywood that
looks like it was borrowed from a 1940s pri vate-eye movie. The plot revolves around the
murder of a gag-gift mogul, and when Roger Rabbit is framed with the murder, private
eye Hoskins gets caught in the middle of the action. As plots go, this one will be familiar
to anyone who has ever seen a hard-boiled ‘40s crime movie - except, of course, for the
Toons.

The movie is funny, but it’s more than funny, it’s exhilarating. It opens with what looks
like a standard studio cartoon (Mother goes shopping and leaves Roger Rabbit to baby-
sit her little brat, who immediately starts causing trouble). This cartoon itself, seen apart
from the movie, is a masterpiece; I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard at an
animated short. But then, when a stunt goes wrong and the cartoon “baby” stalks off the
set and lights a cigar and tells the human director to go to hell, we know we’re in a new
and special universe.
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The movie is filled with throwaway gags, inside jokes, one-liners and little pokes at the
screen images of its cartoon characters. It is also oddly convincing, not only because of
the craft of the filmmakers but also because Hoskins and the other live actors have
found the right note for their interaction with the Toons. Instead of overreacting or
playing up their emotions cartoon-style, Hoskins and the others adopt a flat, realistic,
matter-of-fact posture toward the Toons. They act as if they’ve been talking to animated
rabbits for years.

One tricky question is raised by a movie like this: Is it for kids, or adults, or both? I think
it’s intended as universal entertainment, like “E.T.” or “The Wizard of Oz,” aimed at all
audiences. But I have a sneaky hunch that adults will appreciate it even more than kids,
because they’ll have a better appreciation of how difficult it was to make, and how
effortlessly it succeeds. Kids will like it, too - but instead of being amazed at how they
got the rabbits in with the humans, they’ll be wondering what adults are doing walking
around inside a cartoon.
FANTASY
FAMILY
CRIME
 COMEDY
ANIMATION
ACTION

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In
1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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 Film Credits

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Rated PG

103 minutes

Cast
Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant
Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom
Joanna Cassidy as Dolores
Charles Fleischer as Roger's Voice
Stubby Kaye as Marvin Acme
Directed by
 Robert Zemeckis
Produced by
 Robert Watts
 Frank Marshall
Screenplay by
 Jeffrey Price
 Peter S. Seaman
Edited by
 Arthur Schmidt
Photography by
 Dean Cundey
Music by
 Alan Silvestri
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