|Jackson Stern|
Who Framed Roger Rabbit plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 6th, through Sunday, March 8th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I remember when I was eleven or twelve and I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the first time. Around the age of ten, I caught the cinephile bug after discovering classics like King Kong and Casablanca but before that, I was utterly obsessed with theatrical cartoons of the 40s and 50s, specifically Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker, with a fair interest in Walt Disney’s creations as well. So when I heard that there was a movie where Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny share the screen, I had to check it out. This was around 2015, 2016 so the only way for me to easily see it was to borrow the DVD from the public library. So, one fateful day, I got it, rushed home, put it on, and it instantly became a favorite of mine. Not only did I love the constant barrage of golden age cartoon goodness but the film noir flair (I had just seen The Maltese Falcon maybe a week or two before it) and its edge: a “kids movie” full of innuendo, rough language, and some fairly gruesome on-screen deaths. A loose remake of Chinatown that also happened to have Droopy Dog as an elevator operator, though I didn’t make the first connection until much later.
Flash forward ten years and we’re still feeling the effects of Hollywood’s great “Frankenstein-ing.” Even when forgetting about the endless remakes, reboots, and sequels, Hollywood has, for years now, been obsessed with bringing together disparate intellectual properties and smushing them into a singular cinematic conglomerate whose only trick up its sleeve is endless reference and ‘member berries. What started off as a quaint superhero mash-up with The Avengers and even Infinity War quickly morphed into something much more perverted. Old men in suits peered into the back-catalogs of their disrespective companies and said, “what can we smash together like action figures that will print money?” The result was films like Ready Player One (sorry Steven), Space Jam: A New Legacy, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers. While one or two of these have the slightest hint of quality, they feel like little more than corporate flexing, itching that part of your lizard brain that says “I too remember the Flintstones, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Disney Princesses. The mega-conglomerate, monopolistic signs of the times too leaked into the realm of cinema and with it, a good helping of dignity.
When you go back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you’re instantly washed over with a sense of amazement caused by how respectful it all is, both to the characters it’s portraying and to the audience who’s witnessing it all. There’s no scene where Chip looks at the camera and says, “Remember when Robert Zemeckis made weird motion capture movies” or where a character literally exclaims, with complete seriousness, “look, it’s Chucky.” In the world of Roger Rabbit, all the cartoon characters are inhabitants of the world they find themselves in and they exist separately from the audience’s perception of them. In other words, they usually do something interesting with them instead of reference for reference’s sake. Betty Boop? She’s serving drinks, along with the penguins from Mary Poppins. Daffy and Donald Duck? They’re dueling entertainers in that same club while Goofy is a famous comedian who also happens to have just had his charges of being a Communist spy cleared (one of the best sight gags in a film full of them). The most egregious scene is probably the Bugs and Mickey one, where it sort of does feel like the film comes to a halt to say, “isn’t this neat?” but it’s so brief and light that you hardly even mind.
The other reason all of this works so well is because the whole thing rarely, if ever, hinges its entire existence on the presence of famous cartoon characters. Strip all of that away and you still have a damn good buddy/crime comedy with just about everything you’d want from a motion picture: humor, action, drama, twists, romance, and action set pieces, all underlined by genuinely impressive commentary on 1940s race relations, gentrification, and corporate greed (all the more impressive when it’s all brought to you by the Walt Disney Corporation). Eddie Valiant is a genuinely interesting, sort of tragic character, who makes a perfect match for the more jovial and annoying Roger and their chemistry is what steers this ship home despite the frequent appearances of classic characters. Where the new Space Jam feels so shameless with its reference, as if the first inkling of an idea for it was to come up with whatever story as a vessel for an orgy between Game of Thrones, Max Max, and whatever other properties they had lying around, Roger Rabbit feels first and foremost a thrilling piece of original cinema with the pre-established characters being the window dressing. In a mediocre metaphor: the base story and characters are the tree where Dumbo is an ornament.
Finding a film like this, one that’s full of various properties converging and doesn’t feel like a completely cynical exercise in the art of cash grab feels next to impossible but this is one that feels pure in its occasional indulgence. It was made at a time when seeing two completely disparate entities on the same frame was totally magical and you’d think that a good bit of that magic would wear off when viewing it today but honestly, it hasn’t one bit. Rewatching this at twenty-one scratched much of the same itches it did when I was eleven and for once, it doesn’t feel like a case of “nostalgia clouding” because this is honestly a more rewarding watch now than it was back then. Even when disregarding the technological feat this was, much like I did here, it’s just a rock-solid flick that deftly crafts a world out of largely pre-existing characters without it feeling the least bit gratuitous. The phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” has grown to be quite an empty one but it might actually apply here because I’d implore you to try to find a “crossover” film like this one, that doesn’t have a disenchanted bone in its body. One that cross-contaminates characters for the purpose of pure worldbuilding, rather than grave-digging, IP-recycling. I have a feeling you’d come back empty-handed.
Edited by Finn Odum