Finally a "cartoon" for adults

Rating: 7/10 (1 May 2009)

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" is not an exercise in exciting murder mystery. The plot is generally unexciting and unoriginal. But all it needs to be is enough to give this ground- breaking mixture of animation and live action room to reach it's potential -- enough to make sure all the cartoon/human jokes could be made and all the muscles of the technology flexed. That's what makes "Roger Rabbit" fascinating the whole way through. You're almost left intrigued only to see if they're going to be able to pull it off the whole movie.
Roger Rabbit is a Bugs Bunny rip-off who in this world is a working actor that has a trouble- making reputation. When a toon-film mogul named R.K Maroon wants to send a message to Roger to get his act together, he hires a P.I named Eddie Valiant, the film's whiskey-swilling film noir-esquire protagonist, to follow Roger's red-headed bombshell (and animated) wife, Jessica, who might be having an affair with the head of ACME, the man who owns Toon- Town -- where everything animated lives. When Roger learns of Jessica's "affair," it's not long before he's framed for ACME's murder. Valiant reluctantly befriends the rabbit and takes his case.
One of the impressive things about the film is it obtained rights to both Warner Bros. and Disney characters. There are countless appearances and part of the fun is picking out which characters are from what. It's a tribute to the world of cartoons by projecting how cartoon characters would act if they were real. That's much of the humor right there of this inventive film. There's a unique cartoon-induced style to all the jokes, fusing the world of live action and 2D brilliantly together. It's in this spirit that a film like "Roger Rabbit" works and that a film just putting the two together for visual effect falls short.
It's also a film for adults. A child would get some of the hijinx, but it's definitely not an appropriate kids film. It comes from the adult perspective on cartoons and plays off the maturity of an audience that grew up loving cartoons.
The only thing the movie lacks other than a bit more of a creative plot structure is good acting. Christopher Lloyd is always a fan favorite (he skyrocketed director Robert Zemeckis' previous film "Back to the Future"), but Bob Hoskins is not leading man material. He's great at interacting with nobody (after all, most of his scenes take place with actors that were drawn in later), but there's the charm of star power missing from the film other than cameos by Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
"Roger Rabbit" is a classic in the sense that nothing else is like it and anything that's tried hasn't been as clever. Robert Zemeckis has made a career reinventing the way we see movies and this late 80s film marked just the beginning.