10 / 10
Official trailer
A Miracle
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a miracle. Even now it’s hard to believe what you’re looking at: cartoon characters casting real shadows, bumping into real lamps, splashing in real water and holding real objects, all sharing the frame with human actors who looked right at them. It still looks better than films made thirty years later with all the computing power in the world.
Robert Zemeckis directed it, three years after Back to the Future, with Richard Williams running the animation.
Disney and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin made it together. That partnership is the only reason Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny ended up in the same shot. It came out in 1988, made a fortune and won four Oscars, three competitive and one special award. It’s a 10, and I don’t think anyone has topped it since.
Something’s Cookin’
The film opens with a complete cartoon short, Something’s Cookin’, made in the style of a forties Warner Bros cartoon. Roger Rabbit is babysitting Baby Herman, who crawls off toward a kitchen full of knives, gas and falling objects, and Roger tries to stop him and gets flattened, burned and crushed at every turn. The cartoon holds up in its own right.
Then a refrigerator lands on Roger’s head, he sees birds instead of stars, and a director shouts cut. The camera pulls back, and we’re on a live-action soundstage.
Roger can’t get the gag right. Baby Herman, it turns out, is a cigar-smoking, foul-tempered middle-aged man in a baby’s body who storms off to his trailer. It’s the whole premise in one move, and it’s hilarious.
The Baby Herman reveal is my favorite laugh in the whole film, and it scores before the story has even started. That cigar in that baby face does more comedy in five seconds than most entire cartoons manage.
The opening is a bravura one, because it shows you both halves of the film’s magic in two minutes. First you get a cartoon as good as the classics it imitates. Then you get the trick that makes the whole film possible: the cartoon was being filmed in the real world all along.
A Detective Who Hates Toons
It’s 1947 in Los Angeles, and toons are real actors who live in a place called Toontown and commute to the studios to make cartoons. Eddie Valiant is a private detective who drinks too much and hates toons, because one of them killed his brother by dropping a piano on his head. He’s broke, and his once-busy office is full of unpaid bills.
He’s hired by the head of Maroon Cartoons to take photographs of Roger’s wife, Jessica, playing patty-cake with Marvin Acme, the owner of Toontown and the gag company that supplies every cartoon prop.
Roger sees the photographs and falls apart. The next morning Acme is found dead, and Roger is the main suspect. He hides in Eddie’s office and begs for help, and Eddie, who hates toons more than anything, reluctantly agrees.
The noir plot runs absolutely straight. Take the toons out, and you’d have a decent forties-style detective story about greed, land and a city being sold off behind closed doors. That seriousness lets the comedy fly.
For Writers
First comes a complete cartoon, then the film pulls back to reveal a soundstage and a foul-mouthed Baby Herman. One move sets up the whole premise.
When you write a story with an unusual world, explaining its rules at length slows the opening and loses the reader. Showing them in action is faster and more memorable. Open with a scene that could only happen in your world, then reveal what makes it strange. Let the reader work out the rules from what they’ve just seen.
Bob Hoskins
Bob Hoskins plays Eddie, and he’s the reason the film works.
He spent months acting against nothing, or against a rubber stand-in, or against a comedian reading lines just off camera, and every look and every reaction matches a character who wasn’t there. His eyelines are perfect. His hands grab things that aren’t in his hands. When Roger clings to him, you believe the weight.
He’s also good as a hard-boiled detective with a broken heart. The film needs that. Eddie’s grief for his brother is real, and his slow return to the world, helped by a rabbit he can’t stand and a waitress who loves him, is the emotional arc of the film. It’s among the most generous performances I can think of, and it deserved far more recognition than it got.
Hoskins reportedly found the work so intense that he struggled to switch it off afterward, still seeing toons that weren’t there. Whatever the truth of that story, you can see the concentration on screen. He never once looks at the wrong spot.
The Ink and Paint Club
The nightclub where toons perform for human audiences is the film’s best location. Donald Duck and Daffy Duck play a piano duel that turns violent. Penguin waiters serve drinks. A gorilla works the door. And Jessica Rabbit, in a red sequined dress, sings a torch song while Eddie tries to keep his eyes on the case and not on her.
It’s also where a darker idea surfaces. The toons are employed to entertain humans and not allowed through the front door as customers. Betty Boop is working as a cigarette girl because her work dried up when cartoons went to color. The comparison with segregated clubs of the forties is there if you want to see it, and the film doesn’t press it. It doesn’t need to.
Mae Questel, who had voiced Betty Boop in the thirties, came back to voice her again, and her few lines are heartbreaking. The club is full of these small touches, affectionate and sad, about an art form and its stars being left behind.
Jessica
Jessica Rabbit is the most famous thing in the film, and the joke is that she isn’t what she looks like. Everyone assumes she’s a femme fatale who married Roger for reasons nobody can understand and is cheating on him. She’s devoted to him, because he makes her laugh, and she spends the film trying to protect him and to find the truth about Acme’s death.
Kathleen Turner, uncredited, gives her a husky speaking voice, and Amy Irving sings for her. Her line about not being bad, just drawn that way, is the film’s cleverest comment on how cartoons, and people, get judged by their appearance. She’s also the most competent person in the film, a very good joke on the whole femme fatale tradition.
She also gives the film its most loyal love story. Jessica loves Roger because he makes her laugh, and she spends the film protecting him while everyone assumes she’s betraying him. The joke is on the audience, and on Eddie, for judging her by her curves.
Judge Doom
Christopher Lloyd plays Judge Doom, the menacing official who has declared that any toon caught breaking the law will be dipped. Lloyd had played the manic Doc Brown in Back to the Future for Zemeckis three years earlier, and Doom is his exact opposite: cold, black-clad, pale and completely still. Lloyd has said he tried not to blink through the whole film, to make Doom seem inhuman.
His entrance into a bar, silencing the room, and his demonstration of the Dip on an innocent cartoon shoe that squeaks in terror as it dissolves, are frightening. The reveal at the end, when his eyes pop out and his voice rises to a scream, is the scariest moment in any Disney-backed film of the decade, and it still gives children nightmares.
The reveal works because the film has been hiding it in plain sight. Doom’s strange stiffness, his pale face and his obsession with the Dip all make sense in hindsight, and Lloyd plays the final scenes with a shrieking, unhinged energy that’s frightening for a family film. Lloyd’s Doom is the part I’d point to whenever someone calls this a kids’ movie. That stillness is creepy long before the reveal, and the shoe in the Dip is the cruelest thing I can remember a family film doing to an inanimate object.
For Writers
Jessica looks like a femme fatale and turns out to be the most loyal and competent character in the film. The film uses the audience’s assumptions against them.
If a character fits a familiar type, readers fill in the rest from the type, and the character stops being a person.
Take a stock character in your story and give them one quality that directly contradicts their type. Reveal it at the moment it matters most to the plot.
The Dip and the Weasels
The Dip is a mixture of turpentine, acetone and benzene that dissolves toons, the only thing that can kill them, and it gives the film real stakes. Toons can survive a piano on the head, but they can’t survive the Dip. Its first use, on that trembling shoe, is shocking for a family film, and every scene after it carries a real sense of danger.
Doom’s enforcers are a gang of weasels in zoot suits and trench coats, one of whom can’t stop laughing, and their fate is one of the film’s great gags. They’re a nod to the gangster films of the thirties and forties, and they’re both funny and threatening, the perfect mix for this film.
How They Did It
Every scene was shot in live action first. Puppeteers, wires and robotic arms moved real objects that the toons would later hold, so a glass would lift, a door would swing or water would splash with nothing visible causing it. Then Richard Williams’ animators drew the characters frame by frame onto the footage, matching every movement, and Industrial Light and Magic combined the two, adding shading and lighting so the toons seemed to sit in real space.
It took more than a year of animation alone, and no film before it had attempted anything on that scale.
The result is that the toons don’t look pasted on. They cast shadows, reflect in mirrors and get wet. Williams received a special Oscar for the animation direction, and the film won three competitive Oscars besides, for editing, sound effects editing and visual effects.
The result still holds up better than a lot of modern effects work, because every toon interacts with something real. Nothing floats. Everything has weight, and the audience’s eye believes it without having to try.
The Deals Behind the Cameos
Getting Disney and Warner Bros characters into the same film took years of negotiation, and Steven Spielberg’s involvement was the key. The studios agreed only on strict conditions, famously that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse would share the screen equally, down to the number of frames each appeared in. That’s why they skydive side by side, and why Donald and Daffy’s piano duel is scrupulously even.
Dozens of characters from every major studio appear: Betty Boop, Droopy, Woody Woodpecker, Dumbo, Tweety, Goofy and many more. No studio has managed a cast like it since, and it’s unlikely any will. It’s the one moment in history when the cartoon world’s rival families all agreed to share a stage.
The Red Car
The mystery at the heart of the film is based on something real. Los Angeles once had an extensive electric streetcar network, the Pacific Electric Red Cars, and in the postwar years it was dismantled as the city built freeways and became dependent on the car. The film turns that history into a villain’s plan, a scheme to buy up the streetcar line and Toontown and replace them with a freeway.
It’s a clever, sad idea buried under the cartoon chaos, and it gives the film an unexpected edge. The villain’s vision of a future of freeways, billboards and fast food, described with glee, is exactly the Los Angeles the audience was living in by 1988. The Red Car plot is the part I admire most as a writer. A cartoon comedy about the death of public transit has no business working, and this one makes a freeway feel like a murder weapon.
For Writers
The villain’s plan is based on the real dismantling of Los Angeles’ streetcars, and his vision of freeways is the city the audience lived in. Real history gives a cartoon plot weight.
Look for one real event your story could echo. Build your villain’s goal around it, and let the reader recognize the connection on their own. Writing Heroes and Villains goes into this in detail.
In a fantasy or comedy, a thread of real history can ground the story and give it an edge the reader doesn’t expect.
What Roger Rabbit Gets Right
Because it does something nobody had done before and nobody has done better since, and because it’s a proper film underneath the technical miracle. The mystery works, the villain is frightening, the jokes are funny, and Eddie’s grief gives it a heart. That’s a love letter to the golden age of cartoons and a small elegy for it, with Betty Boop out of work and the toons living at the edge of a human world that doesn’t respect them.
And it’s a showpiece for Bob Hoskins, who made us believe in a rabbit that wasn’t there. Watch it on the biggest screen you can, and look at the shadows.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Who Framed Roger Rabbit plays a hard-boiled detective story completely straight while the world around it’s a cartoon. The mystery, the corruption and Eddie’s grief all work on their own terms, so the toons can be as wild as they like.
With a wild premise, the instinct is to make everything in the story as wild as the premise. That leaves the reader nothing to stand on.
Anchor your strangest element inside a genre the reader already trusts. Write that genre properly, beat for beat, and let the strange element live inside its frame.
The Verdict on Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Yes, and better. It’s a 10 because nothing in it is wasted: the noir plays straight, the toons have weight, Doom is frightening, and Hoskins sells every frame against characters who weren’t there. No effects film since has made me forget this one, and Bob Hoskins deserved far more credit for it than he got. Watch it with anyone who loves cartoons, and look closely, because there’s something new in every frame.
