#Cast of who framed roger rabbit movie

It is also oddly convincing, not only because of the craft of the filmmakers but also because Hoskins and the other live actors have found the right note for their interaction with the Toons.

#Cast of who framed roger rabbit movie

The movie is filled with throwaway gags, inside jokes, one-liners and little pokes at the screen images of its cartoon characters. But then, when a stunt goes wrong and the cartoon “baby” stalks off the set and lights a cigar and tells the human director to go to hell, we know we’re in a new and special universe. This cartoon itself, seen apart from the movie, is a masterpiece I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard at an animated short. It opens with what looks like a standard studio cartoon (Mother goes shopping and leaves Roger Rabbit to baby-sit her little brat, who immediately starts causing trouble). The movie is funny, but it’s more than funny, it’s exhilarating. As plots go, this one will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a hard-boiled ‘40s crime movie - except, of course, for the Toons. The plot revolves around the murder of a gag-gift mogul, and when Roger Rabbit is framed with the murder, private eye Hoskins gets caught in the middle of the action.

The Toons live in Toontown, a completely animated world where the climax of the movie takes place, but most of the time, they hang out in a version of Hollywood that looks like it was borrowed from a 1940s pri vate-eye movie. The Toons in the movie include not only new characters such as Roger Rabbit and his wife, the improbably pneumatic Jessica, but also established cartoon stars such as Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse and both of the great ducks, Donald and Daffy (they do an act together as a piano duo). The film takes place in Hollywood in 1947, in a world where humans and Toons exist side by side. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is sheer, enchanted entertainment from the first frame to the last - a joyous, giddy, goofy celebration of the kind of fun you can have with a movie camera. Real, living animators did this by hand, and the effort shows in moments like the zowie zoom shots where the camera hurtles at Roger Rabbit and then careens away, with the rabbit changing size and perspective in every frame.īut I’m making the movie sound like homework for a film class. Then they laboriously went through the movie frame by frame, drawing in the cartoon characters.

Then they shot the live action, forcing actors such as Bob Hoskins, the star, to imagine himself in a world also inhabited by cartoons (or “Toons,” as the movie calls them). How did they do it? First, they plotted every scene, shot by shot, so that they knew where the live actors would be, and where the animated characters would be. The movie is a collaboration between Disney Studios and Steven Spielberg, the direction is by Robert (“ Back to the Future”) Zemeckis, and the animation is by Richard Williams. You know how easy it is to make dumb, no-brainer action movies, and how incredibly hard it is to make a movie like this, where every minute of screen time can take days or weeks of work by the animators. In a way, what you feel when you see a movie like this is more than appreciation. They change size and dimension and perspective as they move through a scene, and the camera isn’t locked down in one place to make it easy, either - the camera in this movie moves around like it’s in a 1940s thriller - and the cartoon characters look three-dimensional and seem to be occupying real space. They shake the hands and grab the coats and rattle the teeth of real actors. Roger Rabbit and his cartoon comrades cast real shadows. Like “2001,” “Close Encounters” and “E.T.,” this movie is not only great entertainment but a breakthrough in craftsmanship - the first film to convincingly combine real actors and animated cartoon characters in the same space in the same time and make it look real.