Ahhh, what a heartbreakingly beautiful touchstone in my life...

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2003)

This movie means so much to me.
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT was an extremely important event in my personal lifetime.
I was one of those who had seen in-development clips of the original ROGER RABBIT movie on The Disney Channel back in 1984 (which looked totally different in many ways), and I had thought for the longest time that it had been left for dead until it was rescued by Robert "Back The The Future" Zemeckis (I deliberately write his name that way because that is exactly how the press printed his name every time they mentioned him during this movie's run, so much so that I was making jokes with friends about how Zemeckis must have recently made "Back To The Future" his legal middle names. But I digress).
This movie came out just before I was ready to turn twenty years old that September. And as I watch it now, I still love it every bit as much as I did back then, only now it also brings tears to my eyes due to its representation to me at the time.
1988. We cartoonists growing up were all being mocked and told we had no futures ahead of us. I was being called by my peers an "animation hippie". I had grown up studying to enter the animation industry and had dreams of joining Disney to use the power of the animated cartoon to spread positive vibes and happiness around the world just as Walt used to do, and maybe even save lives. And I had spent all my youth and later my teen years feverishly studying animation and teaching myself technique, preparing myself for the big moment. I had been talking my entire life about how one day there would be a revolution in the animation industry; Hollywood's marketing eggheads would finally be overthrown, animation would one day once again belong to the people. We in the animation industry would finally have the freedom and respect as everyone else did throughout the world in our same field; we would overcome and make animation ours again, unshackling it from the hands of the greedy bosses and worms of Hollywood.
I genuinely and honestly believed that.
And for me, ROGER RABBIT made 1988 my 1968 animation-wise. I sat there with my long-haired, tye-dyed idealism clutching my projects and beloved cartoon icons of the past to my heart as I had cheered ROGER RABBIT on and watched it steamroll Hollywood into being forced to take animation seriously as all-ages entertainment. I saw it countless times in the theatres. Again and again and again. This was it, I had been telling friends. This was the beginning of The Revolution! WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT was my Woodstock, the huge party promising the turning point of historical culture forever and the official beginning of hoped-for dreams for change and happiness.
I was so naive and innocent back then.
Well, as we all know and as I discovered when I finally made my first sojourn to Hollywood, ROGER RABBIT did make it officially cool to love animation again in this country with all ages, but Hollywood... characteristically... refused to relinquish control to the animators as I had predicted. Instead, they allowed a "carefully marketed" version of "hip" new cartoons to merely cash in on the new craze. And they ran it into the ground. Now they are doing the same thing with computer animation, stupidly believing that it's the technology making hit films and not the scripts. Same old, same old. And I ended up learning a hard lesson about how Hollywood leeches art for profit, how only individuals like Walt can truly cause revolutions. And to add insult to injury, we would later get our own knock-to-reality disaster as another attempt at a "Roger Rabbit" move hideously trashed and ended up accidentally mocking that hope in the way that The Rolling Stones' Altamont attempt had with Woodstock, in the form of Ralph Bakshi's COOL WORLD.
But even so, despite its being a disappointment as a now-shattered idealism in my life and it's now representing what *could* have been (and now just to me either, I must add!), I still love this film to pieces. The technology is beautiful and it's so enjoyable that it actually breaks my heart even further to admit what I'm about to say. And that is that while it's such a wonderful film to me both personally and artistically, it is technically also a very lousy one.
Even since I saw it for the first time, several things nagged at me right from the beginning. Fortunately, the movie was still so fun that I was able to overlook them. But here are the things which bothered me:
First of all, I'm afraid that Richard Williams just isn't one of my favourite directors and I honestly wish they had gotten someone else to do it. His draftsmanship is simply too elastic and too undisciplined for the animation to read properly or have genuine physical appeal on screen. As a result the characters all have an unlikeable "rubbery" look that I find unattractive.
Second, I'm still irked at the decision to try to design the characters "painstakingly" to appear the way they did draft-wise back during the era where this film takes place (especially when they aren't consistent about it with all the characters, or sometimes even the same character in different scenes!). I personally would have picked a more modern-era like the 60s or 70s (the book itself took place in modern times) so as to assure better character design appeal, but the marketers were so desperate to make the film timeless that they didn't want to take chances.
Third, the draftsmanship of many of the classic characters is simply awful. As a review of a "Roger Rabbit" catalogue book once sold at that time put it, Williams couldn't draw a lot of these characters "to save his soul". How true. Many look passable enough, but they are ultimately undone by the director's own personal drawing style.
And fourth--and this is probably my biggest complaint--the story. It shows lots of interaction with cartoon characters physically, but there is barely *ANY* emotional or personal interaction with them! The true ideas of humans encountering cartoon characters are blunted as a result as Zemeckis simply waters it all down to a simple piece of "laughter is so important to us all!" tripe, and I have yet to see anyone make a serious attempt to have genuinely deep, personal emotional interaction between toons and people (something I've worked at with all my own stories and ideas throughout my life... am I the only artist out there who sees possibilities in this concept? I used to think everyone else did too, but now I seriously wonder). I keep hoping that someday someone besides myself will be able to make the attempt on the big screen and do it convincingly.
But those four things aside, I still love this movie. How can I not? It's not just a spectacular piece of work, it also meant something huge to me personally. And now these days it will forever after serve as a huge touchstone in my own personal life regarding a specific moment in time which... interestingly enough, just like the original Woodstock festival itself... was lost two years or so after "the big victorious hurrah"and sold out. And in the end, again like Woodstock, nothing was changed except for the worse. And it literally brings tears to my eyes to watch it today on a ***BEAUTIFULLY***-restored DVD double set in widescreen and re-feel that one special time in my life when animation in this country had finally reached the summit of victory... and we who were just on the brink of taking the nosedive into the animation industry were all celebrating while walking home after watching ROGER RABBIT for the first time with our hearts high in the sunset... and the future belonged to us...