It's a...deadly...serious...business!

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2004)

Watching this for the umpteenth time, I am struck by how much this movie resembles Brazil (1985). What, you will say, that was a grim and serious story set in a horrible dystopia. Ah, yes, but one of its main satirical weapons was its over-the-top humour.
Well, Roger Rabbit inverts the formula. We seem to have a zany cartoon comedy. but underlying this is a story about racism and genocide. The cartoon characters, who coexist with humans, are shown as a tolerated subordinated race, good for "singing and dancing and running and jumping". They are called "Toons", which resembles another epithet that used to be a nasty name for black people. And the "solution" is exactly that - a solution of benzene and acetone that will exterminate the Toons by dissolving them.
Both movies are set in something that resembles the 1940's, which gives lots of opportunity for spoofing films noir of the sort that Bogart et al. used to make.
How could something so serious be funny? The best comedy is just a hare's breadth (sorry, couldn't resist) removed from tragedy, which is why Hogan's Heroes is so funny while Disney comedies fall flat from gooey sentiment. Kids love Roger Rabbit, and that should be the ultimate test of whether it's comic or not.
It still amazes me how many grown-ups fail to perceive the underlying message of tolerance and understanding. Perhaps they don't want to...