The Re-Visit: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
When I was 7 I saw WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT in the theaters and thought it was the greatest thing ever. Later that year I went to Disneyland and it was ROGER RABBIT mania all over the place, which hit the notion home that yes, indeed, it was the greatest movie ever. When it hit VHS, I watched the shit out of it, over and over again, but started only really giving a shit about the cartoon parts and less of the film noiry detective parts. It’s probably been a solid 15 years (but more likely 20 years) since I’ve seen ROGER RABBIT, so I decided to give it a re-visit and see whether or not it is, in fact, the greatest movie ever.
ROGER RABBIT is a damn good movie, and at the ripe ol’ age of 32, I think I appreciate it now more than when I was 7. The detective story, the throw-back to film noir whodunits, the masterful way of combing animation and live-action on the screen and make it look believable, not to mention how brilliant it handled Looney Tunes and Disney sharing the big screen for the first time ever. Basically, ROGER RABBIT is great, and not just because of all the animated parts (the parts I loved as a kid), but for all the other parts as well. Fucking brilliant, really.
I also had a few other observations, like….
- Even though it’s wrong on every level, every dude who has ever watched ROGER RABBIT has wanted to fuck Jessica Rabbit, the animated red head with a stacked body that screamed sex louder than any live-action dame ever could have. Never before—or after—has a mainstream animated character been so desirable on the most basic carnal level, and… well, that’s a good thing. Seriously, fucking a cartoon? That shit ain’t right, and yet with all the boob jokes, the jaw-dropping swanking around by Jessica, and the fact that the whole story revolves around a dude who just wanted to play patty cake with her (i.e., bang her), we as the audience can’t think about anything else except how awesome it would be to nail a cartoon.
- Bob Hoskins needs to be in more movies, and not just the boring low-budget indie flicks that he likes to do so much of, but big-budget mainstream shit. For years, I’d look for Hoskins and find nothing, and the few times he did happen to show up in something, it would be so damn adult and “boring” that I wanted nothing to do with it. And now that I’m older, most of Hoskins body of work continues to do nothing for me. Hoskins is great in ROGER RABBIT (a raging alcoholic in a big-budget Disney movie??? Awesome.), but I can’t say much else for his career.
- You know who else is great? The always great Christopher Lloyd. Talk about a dude who needs to be in more movies, and not just in cameo form (though he was great in PIRANHA). I want more movies where Lloyd steals every scene he’s in… he’s a fucking brilliant character actor and the young punks of today’s movie-going youth need to be exposed to his brilliance.
- If Marvel and DC ever want to team up in a big way, they need to take notes from ROGER RABBIT. Director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steven Spielberg were able to put Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on the big screen together, have Daffy Duck and Donald Duck duet it out on pianos, and they were able to create an entire town of cartoons from every studio live in harmony together. The film doesn’t favor one character over another, nor do they favor a studio more than the other (even though it’s a Disney movie), making the end result a masterpiece of beauty that hasn’t been replicated since. Take notes, comic book mega-giants, take notes.
At the end of the day, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT has held up well over the years and will likely go down in the annals of time as one of the great movies to come out of the 1980s, or (for nothing else) as the one movie that made millions of men want to fuck a cartoon.
Grade: A