Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

CHANCES ARE you'll get your share of laughs and dazzlement out of Who framed Roger Rabbit; I did. But looking back on it, an inchoate discomfort with the film turns into disappointment: a very grand gimmick has been made insufficient use of. The most elaborate and technically advanced mixing of live actors and cartoon characters ever--far surpassing earlier experiments of this type--should have yielded something at least as great as the sum of its arts.

The premise of Roger Rabbit is that back in the happy Hollywood of 1947, cartoon characters really existed. Known as Toons, they lived in Toontown, were very nearly indestructible, and became stars in much the same way human performers did. Only, as R. K. Maroon, the head of Maroon Studios, observes as Dumbo flies in and out for a cameo appearance (almost every cartoon character that ever was shows up, however briefly), they work for peanuts. This is the first inconsistency. Since Roger Rabbit, one of Maroon's contract players, has a gorgeous humanoid wife, Jessica, who drives a fancy car and is altogether de luxe (she sings at a Toon nightclub for an exclusive human clientele), some of these peanuts must be golden.

Would that the plot were. It is a rather routine mystery in which Eddie Valiant, a down-at-heel private eye, is hired by Maroon to get evidence on whether Jessica is cheating on Roger with Marvin Acme, the rich manufacturer of party gags: a terrible certainty would be better than the doubt that is undermining Roger's concentration. And, indeed, Jessica is photographed playing patty-cake with Marvin, which seems to be the way Toons have sex. Roger goes berserk, Marvin is killed by a safe dropped on his head (a typical Toon murder weapon -- it is the way a Toon killed Eddie's brother), and Roger is the prime suspect. Taking the law into his hands is the evil, Toon-hating Judge Doom, who has a scheme for razing Toontown and using the land for the first of a network of freeways "with wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see." Judge Doom has his private police -- vicious Toon weasels with genuine guns -- and a turpentiney liquid in which he can dip Toons and dissolve them at his whim.

This is the problem with Who Framed Roger Rabbit: however brilliantly these three-dimensional cartoon figures that cast actual shadows interact with human beings (the technical difficulties that had to be overcome by animators and actors are awesome to contemplate), the human world and the Toon world have not been made to mesh properly. For part of the action follows human laws, rules, values, e.g., the life and modus operandi of a boozing, failing shamus; but another part is strictly cartoony, e.g., the sinister Dipping Judge with his private, murderous police conducting a kangaroo court. It is all right for a talking taxicab or jabbering jumping-bean dum-dum bullets to enter the human world; but a human world run by looney-tunes law (unless it is clever satire, which it isn't here) doesn't sit well.

Neither does Jessica's sexuality make sense. Though she is a Toon, she is shaped like the sexiest of women (Kathleen Turner does her funny-suggestive voice), which makes her being married to Roger look like some sort of unappetizing zoophilia. She even onfirms this with the line, "I love you more than any woman has ever loved a rabbit," which, once the laugh subsides, turns unsavory. As a night club chanteuse, with her build (when Eddie suddenly rises from a crouching position at her feet, his head bangs clangorously against her turret-like breasts), clothes, and persona, she must provide the likes of Marvin Acme with more than patty-cake. Yet it is only in that flimsy flagrante delicto that she is caught. Eddie's girlfriend is quite humanly jealous of this Toon, and rightly so, since she arouses not only Eddie but also a good part of the theater audience with which I saw the film.

It seems to me that you cannot switch dispensations in a plot: all sorts of things can be mixed together, but finally it has to be a Toon world or a human world, or two separate worlds (e.g., Kansas and Oz), each with its own discrete dispensation. Obviously, the filmmakers (Robert Zemeckis, the director, and Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, who loosely adapted the book by Gary K. Wolf--who, I trust, is human rather than a lupine cartoon) think it's funny to exploit this bizarre blend, but it undercuts the life-giving consistency of either movies or cartoons. Dogs playing water polo is funny; dogs playing water polo against human beings even funnier. But the water polo must remain water polo; it cannot change its rules in mid game without forfeiting much of the fun.

This said, I must express my admiration for Bob Hoskins, the marvelous English actor who gives a gloriously funny-serious performance as Eddie. Not only did he have to act opposite a rabbit--even handcuffed to him for quite a while--but, unlike Elwood P. Dowd, he could never see that bunny. All the live action had to be shot separately, the cartoon action super imposed afterward. Yet the amalgam is just about perfect. Several critics have noted that in his small, irascible rotundity, Hoskins suggests a cartoon character, which contributes to the humor. Maybe so; but most of it is still generated by his splendid acting, down to an American accent rather better than most British performers can summon up.

The rest of the human contingent is less impressive, but, then, so are the human roles. Some reviewers have seen a kind of allegory here: the Toons and Toontown standing for blacks and their ghettos. Certain parallels can indeed be perceived, such as the Toon nightclub catering to humans (i.E., the white patrons at a place like the Cotton Club). But nothing much comes of this, and one wonders whether anything like it was even intended. Roger Rabbit is plainly a film for technology's sake and so, ultimately, a case of the tail wagging the rabbit. The combined Disney, Spielberg, and Lucas empired labored on this circa $45-million effort, however, and I have no doubt that they'll earn back every penny of it and then some. Why, life-sized rubber Jessica Rabbit dolls alone--once they think of marketing them--could recoup the outlay.