I feel like there are probably too many people just scrolling past this so let’s go through everything that’s going on here.
1. With Roger’s voice actor standing off camera, Bob Hoskins acts into empty air and frantically sawing at his handcuff, continually looking up and down at different visual marks of various depths. Look at the slow pan up of his eyes in gif 4, and then the quick shift to his side. Think about how, on set, he was looking at nothing.
2. Starting in gif 2, The box must be made to stop shaking, either by concealed crew member, mechanism, or Hoskins own dextrousness, as he is doing all of the things mentioned in point 1.
3. In all gifs, Roger’s handcuff has to be made to move appropriately through a hidden mechanism. (If you watch the 4th gif closely you can see the split second where it is replaced by an animated facsimile of the actual handcuff, but just for barely a second.)
4. The crew voluntarily (we know this because it is now a common internal phrase at Disney for putting in extra work for small but significant reward) decided to make Roger bump the lamp and give the entire scene a constantly moving light source that had to be matched between the on set footage and Roger. This was for two reasons, A) Robert Zemeckis thought it would be funnier, and B) one of the key techniques the crew employed to make the audience instinctually accept that Toons coexisted with the live action environment was constant interaction with it. This is why, other than comedy, Roger is so dang clumsy. Instead of isolating Toons from real objects to make it easier for themselves, the production went out of its way to make Toons interact more with the live action set than even real actors necessarily would, in order to subtly, constantly remind the audience that they have real palpable presence. You can watch the whole scene here, just to see how few shots there are of Roger where he doesn’t interact with a real object.
The crew and animators did all of this with hand drawn cell animation without computerized special effects. 1988, we were still five years out from Jurassic Park, the first movie to make the leap from fully physical creature effects to seamlessly integrating realistic computer generated images with live action footage. Roger’s shadows weren’t done with CGI. Hoskin’s sightlines were not digitally altered. Wires controlling the handcuff were not removed in post.
Who fucking Framed Roger fucking Rabbit, folks. The greatest trick is when people don’t realize you’re tricking them at all.
Let’s also not forget that writing. “Only when it was funny” isn’t just hilarious, it’s great comedy theory. It lampshades the joke, but also serves to remind the viewer that Toons have a separate set of physical laws they adhere to, mostly revolving around comedic value. Roger cannot remove his hand from the cuffs… until it’d get a laugh from an audience.
Everything about this movie, EVERYTHING about it, is so finely crafted. I could wax lyrical about it for days.
Was always one of my favorites
This is one thing that bothered me about Sonic 2020, there’s so little actual interaction between him and physical things, I was painfully aware the actors were looking at nothing and nothing was being touched
Maintaining eye contact with an invisible character is a skill, and a lot of actors aren’t good at it. This is why in a lot of special effects heavy films the actors might seem like they’re just wandering around aimlessly (because they essentially are). Bob Hopkins, however, was SO good at hitting his eye lines that by the end of the production he started to hallucinate that Roger was really there. And even when Bob would “miss” his eye lines in some takes, the animators made an effort to make sure that SOMETHING was where his eyes were looking (be it Roger’s fingers pointing, or having the character stand up taller to make a point). That level of work hasn’t been done on a single 2D/Live action movie since Roger Rabbit, and it shows.
Everyone can pull a term paper out of their ass about every aspect of Who Framed Roger Rabbit right up until someone says “let’s talk about how the movie portrays racism!” And then it get real fucking quiet
Fuck it, I’ll go there…
The racism in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is very explicit. In this world, Toons are definitely seen as a lower class to humans. This is probably most overtly shown in the Ink & Paint club which allows for Toon performers, but not Toon audience members. This mirrors real life establishments from the same era that would allow black performers, but not allow black people to mix with the audience. The fact that Toon Town is it’s own segregated place kept out of view by a giant wall is also telling about how Toons are treated by those around them.
Toons almost EXCLUSIVELY are used for the entertainment purposes of humans, and are treated as commodities. You don’t see Toons anywhere else in the city except as workers going to the Maroon Cartoon Studios. They trade Toons with other studios (”got them on loan from Disney, him and half the cast of Fantasia”) and pay them literal peanuts instead of money, exploiting them for their labor. Even Jessica Rabbit is seen as a commodity. She was “drawn” to be sexually evocative to humans, and she clearly resents it (her famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” line).
What does it say about this society where they allow a human “judge” to roam Toon Town outright MURDERING Toons for committing small infractions and crimes? It says to me that Toons are seen as such a lower class that humans feel like they need to “control” them and impose their will on theirs through capital punishment. Humans in this world essentially are saying “You’re here for MY entertainment, and if you break any laws we’ll KILL you.”
I mean, the whole PLOT of the film is about a real-estate developer trying to destroy a Toon neighborhood to make millions on highway development. Heck, even the subplot is about a detective who’s backstory is his brother was killed by a Toon and that’s why he’s racist against them. Eddie’s arc in the film is to learn that just because a Toon killed his brother, he shouldn’t resent ALL Toons. Swap out the word “Toon” for “black person” and you can see a lot of parallels to real-life class racism.
Now, whether or not those parallels WORK for you is another matter. But the fact that the writers baked those parallels into the work in the first place is more than any other 2D/live action hybrid film has ever done. The undertones are there if you look for them.
God, this is one of my favorite movies for all the reasons listed above and more
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