Even though WarnerMedia will soon launch its own streaming service, you can still see Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner-owned Looney Tunes on Disney+. You just need to travel to Toontown and fire up Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a cartoon and live-action hybrid that’s a salute to Hollywood’s past in more ways than one, while also, in a way, heralding its future.
Released in 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit starred Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, a sour Private Eye working in 1947 Los Angeles. Eddie is, in many ways, a loving parody of a classic film noir hero, as he hits all the tropes so hard it would be cartoonish if Eddie weren’t the straight man. That’s important, because his co-stars are literally cartoons. Eddie lives in a version of Hollywood where cartoon characters are just like any other actor looking for work, and before too long, Eddie finds himself tasked with figuring out who framed one toon—Roger Rabbit—for the murder of Marvin Acme (of Road Runner/Coyote fame).
As Eddie and Roger attempt to crack the case, they encounter all sorts of famous fellow toons, including Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny in their first (and possibly only official scene together. Daffy Duck and Donald Duck play at a dueling piano bar, a host of familiar faces from Disney animated classics make cameos, and non-Disney or Looney Tunes characters like Droopy Dog, Woody Woodpecker, and Betty Boop all pop up as well.
Technically, the movie is a marvel, as all of the cartoon characters were animated by hand and added to the live-action footage, with George Lucas’s Industrial Lights and Magic company doing further special effects to make it so the lighting on the toons matched the lighting on the real-life sets and characters. Hoskins was frequently acting opposite nothing, and whenever Roger or some other toon interacted with a real-life object, it had to be moved with wires or puppetry, timed to match where animated hands would be later in post-production.
In a way, it’s not too dissimilar from the way modern blockbusters are made. Photos from the set of Avengers: Endgame, for instance, reveal lots of green screens and actors looking at ball-covered stand-ins for what will eventually become computer-generated foes. The level of technology—and in many ways immense difficulty—is palpable in Who Framed Roger Rabbit though. It’s a triumph of a now-unnecessary sort of filmmaking, especially when you consider that traditional animation is almost extinct on the big screen.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit doesn’t just feel comfortingly old because of the dated (if impressive) filmmaking techniques. It’s also the sort of movie Hollywood just doesn’t make anymore—and it probably felt that way in 1988 too. Film noir peaked in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and while neo-noirs like Chinatown and Taxi Driver would continue to evolve the spirit of the genre, and modern movies like The Nice Guys play in a similar space, Who Framed Roger Rabbit leans so damn hard into the classic look and feel of yesteryear noir—you know, just with cartoons. Even when it was made, this movie was paying homage to old school Hollywood, and time has made that sort of style even more distant.
If there’s one way that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was prescient, in addition to its foreshadowing of how Hollywood would blend animation and live-action, it’s that the movie is a giant crossover. Shared universes dominate the box office, and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny sharing a universe (and a couple of laughs) is a pretty big deal. But even that seems like a relic. Sure, The Avengers is a crossover, but they’re a wholly-owned Disney crossover (plus Sony’s Spider-Man, continuously). As Disney, WarnerMedia, and all the other companies circle their IP wagons and take their valuable franchises to their own streaming platforms, it seems harder to conceive of Roger Rabbit’s meeting of the cartoon worlds taking place again. Similar things can still happen—Wreck-It Wralph’s many video game cameos are probably the closest thing we’ll come to seeing such ambitious crossover—but even then you can feel the corporate phantoms pulling the strings and rattling their piggybanks behind the scenes.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a classic movie because it celebrates classic cinema, classic cartoons, and, although they didn’t know it at the time, classic animation and filmmaking techniques. And if that’s not enough, it boasts quite possibly the scariest villain in any Disney movie. Remember him? He talked Just. Like! THIIISSSSS!!!!
