Who Framed Roger Rabbit

(1988) dir. Robert Zemeckis
viewed: 05/26/07

Friday night is movie night for my kids and most of the time they watch any array of video garbage.  I started with them trying to only expose them to the stuff that I considered worthy, and to my credit along these lines, I have a moderate collection of Betty Boop, Bullwinkle and Rocky, and Hayao Miyazaki films and videos.  I was actually given a copy of Who Framed Roger Rabbit several years back, and I’ve had it on my shelf just waiting for a day like this.

Really, it’s a bit adult for them.  It’s got a complex storyline that is hard to explain.  I think my son enjoyed it pretty well.  My daughter’s interest came in small waves.

My own interest in the film is fairly strong.  I saw it when it first came out in 1988, and I was pretty into it then.  Later “readings” of the film or however you want to call it when you are looking at them from a film criticism/theory perspective, added a lot of analytical weight, but still pretty fun.

I parsed out the opening scene for a class, going from the opening credits to a faux-classical style animation short featuring Roger and Baby Herman, that gets broken up when a director calls “Cut!” due to Roger producing tweeting birds above his head instead of the called-for stars.  This is the movie’s premise and main device, that cartoons in the heyday of Hollywood were as real as the human stars and acted on sets just the same way.  But the funny part about how the film opens is that it uses that break to introduce the concept in a funny way, but it’s also breaking the illusion of the original narrative and revealing some of the filmic mechanism, though in a completely false way.

Anyways, that was a long time ago that I thought along those lines and was probably a tad better articulated at the time.  The other storyline that I found interesting is the basic storyline of the film, that of this evil cartoon, Judge Doom, has bought up the streetcars in Los Angeles and wants to destroy Toon Town and all this stuff that made Hollywood “great” to build highways, strip malls, fast food restaurants, and the like.  The poignant irony in the ‘toons winning out in this film is that basically, the oil and automobile industries did just that (though not so much at the expense of animation and its prime period) but at the expense of LA, California, the United States…  There is a commentary, largely ironic and comical, whose criticism is foretext, not subtext.

This, for me, is Robert Zemeckis’s own “acme”.  Though I don’t know that he can ever be forgiven for Forrest Gump (1994), he has remained on the verging lines of being semi-interesting while residing the dead center of American popular cinema.  I guess, having a strong appreciation for the era of American animation that is being given homage here, I guess I have a soft spot for this film.  While it’s not a work of genius and it’s not a masterpiece, I still find it fun, clever, and amusing, no matter what my kids think.