Word: rabbiters
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...this elaborate new blend of animation and live action co-produced by Disney and Steven Spielberg, the "cartoon before the movie" is how the movie begins. As you settle into your seat, the Maroon cartoon studio logo flares onto the screen, announcing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, starring Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit. For a few minutes of inventive mayhem, the infant crawls toward every lethal kitchen appliance while his harried hare of a baby-sitter works frantically to keep things from blowing up. It's the comedy of anticipated disaster -- the nightmare anxiety that propelled so many of Avery...
...film's nice conceit that Roger, Baby Herman and all the other characters from '40s Hollywood animation are creatures of a subhuman species known as Toons. They breathe, they emote, and sometimes they get cuckolded by their sultry wives. Jessica Rabbit, Roger's spouse, is one such bimbette. "I'm not bad," Jessica pouts, "I'm just drawn that way." But all Toontown knows she's been spending time with Marvin Acme, who owns the local gagworks. So when Marvin gets bumped off, Roger is the prime suspect. His only hope is Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a human detective...
...Roger Rabbit careers like a Toontown trolley and boasts a technical dexterity that Walt Disney could only have daydreamed of. At first you may snap to suspicious attention when, say, a cartoon stork pedals a real bicycle, or Jessica diddles a human's necktie. But the film encourages you to vacation in its ingenuity. Drop by the Ink and Paint Club, Toontown's toniest dive, where the password is "Walt sent me," penguin waiters patrol in tuxedos, and Daffy and Donald Duck, together for the first time, perform a piano duet. Meet old friends like Mickey and Bugs, Tweety...
...mean you could have taken your hand out of that handcuff at any time?" an incredulous Eddie asks Roger after the rabbit slips his shackles. "Not at any time," comes the retort. "Only when it was funny." Such are the Toontown laws of physics; they do not always apply to this movie. Every framed frame is beguiling, as befits a pioneering project made by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) and ace Animator Richard Williams. But not all the gags -- even those quoted from such Bugs Bunny classics as Falling Hare and Rabbit Seasoning -- have the limber...
Working in anonymity, the old masters of animation were free to wreak fertile anarchy. Today those cartoons are deemed big art, and Roger Rabbit is big business. The film cost about a zillion simoleons (well, $35 million) and carries a humongous 739 names on the credits (not including Kathleen Turner, who lends her voice to Jessica). Something got lost in the move from storyboard to screen, and in the stretch from seven minutes to 103. From sad experience, Disney and Spielberg should know the perils of paying huge homage to modest genres, yet Roger Rabbit has the odor...