Sunday (June 22) was the 20th anniversary of this amazing movie’s opening. In an age of digital characters being rather ubiquitous, it’s hard to believe this film was the showcase on state-of-the-art special effects for integrating live action with an imaginary character. In many ways, the techniques used to make Roger “real” were a vast improvement over Mary Poppins and probably led to the refinements on making Gollum possible while sharing the blame for Jar Jar Binks. Looking back, one would think everybody involved was nuts. Before computers became practical on the tedious matters, people had to draw, ink and paint all the characters. Then they took it a step further by painstakingly getting all the light and shadow elements as close as possible. This is what blew audiences away.
After two decades, Roger Rabbit continues to impress me because it is based upon a solid screenplay. The original book is completely different and would’ve flopped according to Somara, the only person I know who actually read Who Censored Roger Rabbit. Why Disney chose to buy the novel rights is beyond me. When Somara gave me a synopsis of Gary Wolf’s 1981 novel, Roger Rabbit sounded more like another controversial Ralph Bakshi cartoon.
The great acting of Bob Hoskins is what really made the film a success. Christopher Lloyd, Kathleen Turner, Joanna Cassidy and Charles Fleischer helped immensely but Bob did most of the physical stuff to make it appear realistic. Somara’s deluxe DVD of Roger Rabbit shows all the behind-the-scenes work he had to endure, mainly hanging from strings to assist the blue-screen work or maintaining his eye lines for interacting with characters the animators had to paint in later. The only downside is it ruins future viewing because you now notice the robots under the drawings more.
As a huge fan of animation, this movie was also the coolest gathering of characters which rarely happens since the copyright holders are as petty as they are greedy. I cannot remember how the producers ironed out an arrangement Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal and Ted Turner’s corporation could agree on. Somehow the producers succeeded, giving Roger Rabbit a huge showcase of Who’s Who from animation’s Pre-WWII period which will probably never happen again.
With this Summer being the movie’s Twentieth anniversary, I want to make a recommendation to revisit it. If you now have kids, I think they’ll be amused even after the opening cartoon.