Who Framed Roger Rabbit
It was the ultimate Hollywood team-up – and a showstopping Fx triumph. 30 years later Simon Bland heads back to Toontown...
Iwanted to do something that incorporated the two loves of my childhood: cartoon characters and noir mysteries,” reveals author Gary K Wolf. In 1981, he used this unusual combo as the inspiration for the book behind Robert Zemeckis’s groundbreaking 1988 hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While audiences nearly 40 years on revelled in Steven Spielberg’s pop-culture mash-up Ready Player One, it was back in Toon Town where the mega-director first flexed his unparalleled Hollywood sway to produce a film unlike anything seen before — a cartoon live-action hybrid that did the impossible and introduced Mickey Mouse to Bugs Bunny.
“I was watching Saturday morning cartoons, purely for research,” smiles Wolf, recalling his route into the story, “and I became taken with the commercials. I saw Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger talking to real kids and nobody seemed to think that was odd. That was when the light bulb went off: What kind of world would it be if cartoon characters were real?” Riding a wave of inspiration, Wolf quickly began populating his big idea. “I came up with private eye Eddie Valiant, who I named after my father, and I came up with Roger Rabbit who I based on a crossbreed of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny,” he explains. “Mickey Mouse is the straight-ahead good guy and never screws around. Bugs Bunny will tell you one thing and then put a stick of dynamite down your pants — I wanted a character that was an amalgamation of the two. Roger Rabbit is a good guy who’s also a trickster. I also came up with his wife Jessica who I based on Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood.”
Word spread quickly regarding Wolf’s unusual mix of kids’ fiction and crime noir. Handing the book to publishers, it wasn’t long before some unexpected people came knocking.
“I got a call and the voice on the phone said, ‘This is Roy Disney from the Disney Corporation. I wondered if you’d be interested in selling us the rights to your book because we’d like to make it into a movie.’
I thought it was my friends having one off on me,” he admits. It wasn’t. Having turned down ET and Star Wars, Disney was in dire need of a hit and that’s exactly what they saw in Roger Rabbit. “They wanted Roger, they wanted Jessica, they wanted Baby Herman and they wanted Toon Town,” says Wolf. “Of course, I was thrilled but frankly, I didn’t think this movie was filmable.”
It turned out Wolf was right. Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, with its toon characters speaking in comic-strip word balloons, wasn’t filmable in its current form unless Disney wanted a silent movie. Many attempts were made to fix it — and then in 1985, everything changed.
“Disney did something they’d never done before and brought in an outside producer. That guy’s name was Steven Spielberg,” says Wolf. “He brought in Bob Zemeckis who had been offered the project in ’80 or ’81 but turned it down because he didn’t think he could pull it off. Now Steve was involved, he obviously thought he could do it. That was really the turning point. Once Steve and Bob Z got involved, the project took off and never looked back.”
White rabbit
Things moved quickly but with such a lofty task ahead of them (full of brand-new filmmaking techniques), it was far from business as usual. “I knew about it before the script because I was used to help them audition the Eddie Valiant character,” says the voice of Roger Rabbit himself, Charles Fleischer. “I had to be there off-camera while they were doing screen tests so that gave me a clue as to the process they were going to be utilising — recording the voice live on set, then animating immediately after. The people involved were such high calibre that I had no doubts that it would be incredible.”
Having impressed during screentests, Fleischer was formally offered the role and began work on bringing the character to life. First stop: the voice.
“It was kind of a cross between John Huston and Ruth Gordon,” says Fleischer. “The more I did it, the more it became Roger. I had to develop the speech impediment — the ‘pb-pb-pb-please’ — that was a requirement,” explains Fleischer of Roger’s trademark motormouth. Also as a stand-up comedian, he didn’t struggle relating to the crowdpleasing aspects of his carrot-loving counterpart. “He was more like me than any character I’ve ever played and he was a damn cartoon,” says Fleischer candidly. “What does that tell you?”
That said, this was no ordinary voiceover role. Like his live-action colleagues, Fleischer was present on set, even in costume, providing a proto-motion capture performance. “They thought I was out of my mind,” says Fleischer, recalling how co-stars Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd reacted to seeing him dressed in full rabbit regalia. “I think they were a little cautious as to the validity of my sanity but after a while it did add to the general feel of the whole process. For instance, if Bob reached over and grabbed me, he’s working with this space in front of him where I will be, so I had to react to that. I called it trans-projectional acting, where I’m projecting myself into a physical space in front of another actor. It was groundbreaking technique,” he explains. “No one had ever done that before.”
Production on Who Framed Roger Rabbit took three years, with the film debuting at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 1988 and Zemeckis’ crew working on it until the day before release. “They really had to make three movies,” says Wolf, “live-action, animated and a combination of the two so it looked like they were in the same movie. They couldn’t tell whether it was going to be a hit but it surprised everybody and became the highest grossing movie of 1988, and winning Academy Awards.
“I think I soiled my garments,” admits Fleischer on seeing the film for the first time. “I’d seen snippets along the way but the finished product was groundbreaking. As for Roger’s performance, after he finds Jessica playing Patty Cake and he’s sitting alone in an alley, sad and somewhat tearful — that moment always stood out to me because my youngest daughter is also named Jessica. It was rather profound.” This heartfelt reception was also shared by audiences. “When the movie came out on VHS, people started showing it to their kids, so a whole new generation found it. When it came out on DVD, the same. It’s a cultural thing,” suggests Wolf. “I think the main reason Roger Rabbit has succeeded is because it doesn’t trivialise animation. I’ve talked to people who are 50 who still have nightmares about Judge Doom. It’s a childish concept used to present an adult story; it’s been successful for so long is because it’s timeless.”
Wolf’s not wrong. In 2016, the film was inducted into the National Film Registry, preserving it forever for future generations.
“I’m amazed that this was all based on something that I came up with while watching Saturday morning cartoons,” laughs Wolf. “Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to have such an impact on popular culture. It’s just astounding. When I die, if on my tombstone it says ‘Gary K Wolf; He Created Roger Rabbit’ — that’d be enough.”
Fleischer has similar thoughts on the film’s longevity. “It’s a classic because it’s great storytelling. It’s not a kids’ movie, it’s not an adults’ movie — it’s just a movie. It was part of audiences’ lives,” he says. “They watched it every day or a million times a day.”
With the film reaching a third of a century in age, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the techniques it pioneered feel more relevant than ever, with sequel talk never too far away. It begs the question: what would Roger Rabbit be up to these days?
“I think he’d just be doing the same thing,” suggests Fleischer, “making people laugh, trying to get work, eating carrot cake...” Without warning, Roger chimes in: ‘Well they don’t make films like this anymore, I tell ya’. Being a part of this picture is something you’ll never forget! Jeez, I wouldn’t mind a sequel but I don’t think it’s going to happen... with the first one as good as it was, I tell ya’ mister, that’s as good as it gets!”