Diving back into the bright, technicolour world of the Robert Zemeckis-directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was released officially in Australia on 24 November 1988, is like re-acquainting yourself with a very funny, hilariously bawdy old friend whom you haven’t seen in years but with whom you still have this undeniable, richly-wonderful rapport.
Before you even know what’s hit you, you’re in the midst of one of the Looney Tunes-like cartoons in which Roger Rabbit usually stars alongside the cigar-chomping Baby Herman (voiced by Lou Hirsch), the violently-slapstick shenanigans recalling the likes of Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.
It’s an inspired way to begin a movie that that is a cleverly-original as they come, a seamless mix of animation and real-life action that never feels less than real throughout its entire, laugh-filled, heavily pop-culture referencing 100-minute length.
To be honest, the idea of bringing together people and cartoon characters in an alternate-history 1947 Los Angeles might have played as a one-joke idea that quickly runs out of juice; but such is the commitment of everyone concerned, most particularly Bob Hoskins who plays washed-up alcoholic private eye Eddie Valiant (a reference to the comic strip knight of the 1930s and ’40s) that you don’t for a second not believe anything happening before your eyes.
In fact, from the get-go when a distracted Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer), fresh from having a fridge fall on his head where he erroneously manifest chirping birds not the required stars – “toons”, as they’re widely known through Roger Rabbit can take all kinds of physical injury without suffering any lasting effects – begs and pleads with his director to give him another shot at nailing the scene, and a sleazy Baby Herman tries to look up a female production assistant’s skirt, the argument that toons and people belong in the same reality makes perfect, undeniable sense.
That’s true not just from a production point of view, but thematically too.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? may look likes a kids’ movie, and truth be told, it could play that way with many of the adult gags going over young innocent heads, but it comes loaded with all kinds of very grown-up references.
Valiant, for instance, is a raging alcoholic, a man still grieving the loss of his brother five years earlier at the hands of a malicious toon with glowing red eyes and a maniacal, high-pitched laugh, who has an understandable mistrust of toons – so naturally he and Roger end up as the odd couple team trying to solve the murder of a character whose role in the film noir-esque plot is pivotal – and who is neglecting the love of his life, bar owner Dolores (Joanna Cassidy) who continues to stand by her man come what may.
The film’s willingness to deal with issues such as grief and its messy aftereffects, racism – it’s clear that the toons are second-class citizens in Hollywood who are segregated in their own vibrantly-alive and gorgeously-colourful, all-singing, cartoon-happy world whose very existence is under threat in the fast-moving plot – political and financial corruption (the loss of a public transport system to automotive interests which really happened in L.A.) and judicial malfeasance lends a substantive feel that makes it far off than some cartoon/real-life hybrid gimmick.
Emotionally too Roger Rabbit packs a sizeable wallop.
You may not think you couldn’t be emotionally invested in the marital troubles, largely fabricated, of Roger and his va-va-boom sexy bomb singer wife Jessica (Kathleen Turner in an uncredited role) or the malevolent threat posed by the evil Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) who is clearly anti-toon in the most white supremacist of ways but you are, almost right from the start, quickly aware that while the film may look sing-songy bright and breezy, and in many ways it is, it is dark as hell beneath its comical surface.
It all works a treat, with film balancing some very disturbing themes alongside the kind of cartoon slapstick that anyone with even a passing love of Looney Tunes or Hanna-Barbera shorts will be intimately and happily familiar.
For all that serious undertow, Roger Rabbit is a very funny film.
Take one scene where Eddie and Roger are hiding out in a cinema, trying to keep out of the way of Judge Doom who clearly has it in for Roger, wanting nothing more than to dispense summary justice by dipping in a lethal concoction called The Dip which is the only way indestructible toons can die.
In a tender moment where Eddie, who once loved being in Toon Town, spills about his brother’s death and how it happened, and Roger bursts into tears at the idea that anything so terrible could happen to someone, and at a toon’s hand no less, there is an important step along the way for not just Roger and Eddie’s blossoming friendship but Eddie’s emergence from grief.
That may not seem like the funniest of scenes but after Eddie apologises for his attitude and for yanking Roger’s ears, our lovably excitable eponymous hero, who goes ballistic, narratively-conveniently, every time he drinks alcohol, exclaims in the hilariously-childlike of ways “All the times you yanked my ears?”
It’s a knock it out of the park perfect piece of comic timing that’s not just funny in and of itself but made even more so by the way Hoskins and Fleischer invests in with emotional gravitas.
Other lines such as Jessica Rabbit’s immortally-dusky “I’m not bad; I’m just drawn that way” and her sultrily-loving assurance to her husband – “Oh Roger, you were magnificent. Better than Goofy” – and countless others besides, play beautifully, their inherent comic greatness amplified by the serious film noir plot in which they’re expressed.
Ultimately, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? works, and works magnificently, because for all its cartoon pratfalls and innate silliness, and character namedropping – everyone from Donald and Daffy Duck, who feature in a classic piano duel, to Dumbo, Goofy, Tweety Bird, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and a down-on-her-luck Betty Boop (colour cartoons haven’t been kind to the black and white animation star) – it is very serious, a film that looks brilliantly-colourful at every turn but which, at its heart, tells the kind of intelligent story which elevates it to a wholly-affecting, utterly-immersive and emotionally-resonant piece of superlative filmmaking.