(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material. New to the blog? Start at the start with Snow White.)
Doom tells Eddie that he’s planning on capturing Roger and summarily executing him for the crime of killing a human, saying an example needs to be made (another thing we learn about toons in this world, practically zero rights). He demonstrates how he’s planning on doing this by killing a innocent little toon shoe that’s been trying to make time with his footwear.
While looking over the front page of a newspaper, Eddie spots something unusual in the picture of Marvin Acme; The Will!
Realising that he’s just stumbled over a massive clue that could blow this whole case wide open, Eddie says “fuck it” and goes to sleep. Unfortunately, there’s already someone in his bed, which can be a very good thing or a very bad thing.
Roger explains that he didn’t kill Acme, and instead that he went to the Ink and Paint Club to confront Jessica and wrote her a love letter on a blank piece of paper that he found in her dressing room. Then Judge Doom’s goons (a pack of cartoon weasels) showed up so he ran to offices of Valiant and Valiant because they’re famous for helping toons in distress. Roger’s news is obviously out of date, because in the intervening years Valiant and Valiant has become Valiant and Seething Hatred/Barely Functional Alcoholism. Eddie is about to turn Roger in to the cops when the weasels show up at his door. Knowing that if they catch him Roger is as good as dipped, Eddie grudgingly agrees to hide him while the weasels tear his office apart. After they leave Eddie stashes Roger in the speak-easy at the back of Dolores’ bar and goes back to the office to do some sleuthing. There he finds Jessica (Kathleen Turner) waiting for him.
Jessica tells Eddie that he was set up to take the pictures of her and Marvin Acme, and that she was blackmailed into going along with it by RK Maroon who threatened to blackball Roger. Jessica gives Eddie the famous line “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”
Soooo…how does that work exactly? Do animators actually exist in this world? My personal head canon is that animation doesn’t actually exist in Eddie Valiant’s world and that toon town is an interdimensional portal. Every time a cartoon character is created in our universe that character comes to life in Eddie Valiant’s world. So, say in 1914, Gertie the Dinosaur appears in what will one day become Toon Town and by 2014 Toon Town has expanded into a massive madcap, megalopolis the engulfs half the West Coast.
Dolores shows up and is none too happy to find Jessica draped all over Eddie. Once she’s calmed down she tells Eddie that it’s not RK Maroon that wants to get his hands on Toon Town, it’s Clover Leaf, the mysterious company that’s been buying up public transport in LA and then shutting it down. This is actually a reference to the General Motors Steetcar Conspiracy, which claims that GM bought up public transportation companies and then scuttled them to ensure that everyone would have to buy a car. Honestly, I don’t know what to think about that. No one seems to know for sure if the theory is complete bunk, or if it absolutely happened or if it happened but not the way everyone says it did and frankly I’m not ready to investigate another conspiracy theory so soon after my last brush with the Secret Lizard Kings so let’s just file it under “maybe”.
Dolores and Eddie arrive back at the bar to find that Roger has interpreted their instructions to stay quiet and hidden rather loosely; putting on a full song and dance show for the patrons set to The Merry Go Round Broke Down. Furious, Eddie drags Roger into the backroom and asks him “What the hell brah?” and Roger explains that the patrons needed to laugh. Eddie says that once Angelo has finished laughing he’ll rat Roger out in a cold minute but Roger says that making people laugh is the only weapon a toon has.
Doom arrives, like the black spectre of death itself and offers a whole lotta scratch (the kinda scratch that makes a fella wonder where you get that kinda scratch) to anyone who can tell him where Roger is. Angelo says that he’s seen a rabbit and then stretches out his arm saying, “Say hello, Harvey!”
Foiled by Angelo’s passion for contemporary American theatre, Doom tries another tactic, rapping the first five beats of “Shave and a Haircut” until Roger can’t resist exploding through the wall and hollering “TWO BITS!”
Well, who can resist Barber Shop?
Doom is about to shove Roger into the business end of a can of dip, but Eddie intervenes by offering Roger a last drink. He convinces Roger to drink it with a little “Duck Season/Rabbit Season” and Roger once again can’t handle his booze and ends up wrecking half the bar like an Englishman. Eddie and Roger escape and try to steal the weasel’s van but there’s no key. Fortunately they find Benny (Fleischer again) a cartoon cab and manage to drive him to safety.
Eddie and Roger hide out in movie theatre and Eddie finally reveals to Roger the origin story of that stick up his ass. Roger is horrified to hear that a toon killed his brother and says that he doesn’t blame Eddie for hating him. Eddie says that he doesn’t hate him.
Dolores arrives and tells Eddie that she got his message and would have been there sooner but that she had to shake the weasels (not a euphemism). Eddie and Roger get ready to skip town in Eddie’s car but a newsreel suddenly appears onscreen announcing that Maroon Studios has just been purchased by Clover Leaf. Eddie and Roger head over to Maroon studios and Eddie tells Roger to keep an eye out while he shakes down Maroon for information. After Eddie threatens to feed Maroon to an editing machine, the cartoonist confesses that he wanted to sell the studio to Cloverleaf but that they were only interested in the land if Acme was also selling his. Acme refused to sell, so Maroon was planning on using the photos to blackmail him into selling. Maroon says he doesn’t want to see the toons destroyed and that unless Acme’s will turns up by midnight Toon Town will be “Land for the free BANG gurgle gurgle gasp croak.” At least, I think that’s what he said. It was kinda hard to make out, he was getting shot at the time. Eddie rushes to the window and sees Jessica fleeing the scene of the crime.
He runs downstairs to find Roger missing and a car fleeing the scene. He chases after it until he comes to the tunnel leading into Toon Town. Eddie hesitates, but finally musters up the courage to go in after, first discarding his gun and taking a cartoon six-shooter gifted to him by Yosemite Sam (“Thanks for getting me out of the hoose-gow”) that comes complete with six cartoon bullets (one voiced by Jim Cummings and another by Scratchy Era mainstay Pat Buttram). Eddie empties out his bottle of booze and then throws it up in the air and shoots it (which, while great as symbol of his finally breaking his dependency on alcohol, is not really a good use of scarce ammo) and then enters the very mouth of Bahia itself.
The Toon Town sequence is just a riot of colour and blink-and-you’ll-miss ’em cameos, all scored to the chipper yet faintly menacing tune Smile, Darn ya, Smile. Again, I could spend practically the entire review just pointing out the cameos but I haven’t eaten in three days so let’s just push on. Eddie searches for Jessica, running into character as diverse as Droopy, Lena Hyena, Tweety Pie and even Bugs Bunny and the Black Mouse himself.
Finally he tracks Jessica to a darkened back alley and she gets the drop on him. Instead of shooting him though, she saves him from being shot by Doom. Jessica explains that Doom killed RK Maroon and that the reason Roger went missing from the studio was because she clobbered him with a frying pan and stuffed him in the boot of her car so that he wouldn’t get hurt. However, when they get to her car Roger has escaped from the boot and taken Eddie’s car, leaving them stranded. Eddie flags down Benny the Cab and they race off to find Roger. As they drive Jessica tells Eddie that Marvin Acme had given her the will for safe keeping but that when she opened it it was just a blank piece of paper. Eddie asks Jessica what she sees in Roger and she simply says “He makes me laugh.”
Outside Toon Town, Doom dumps a barrel of dip on the road which causes Benny to go swerving into a lampost. Jessica and Eddie are taken prisoner and brought to the Acme Factory where the weasels search them for the will but can’t find it. Doom tells Eddie that without the will Cloverleaf legally owns Toon Town and that Cloverleaf only has one shareholder and his name ends in “Doom.”
Doom then unveils his master plan and then unveils a massive machine and basically this guy is on an unveiling roll.
Doom explains that he’s planning on slathering Toon Town in more dip that a bowl of doritos and wiping it off the map to make way for a freeway, “eight shimmering lines of concrete from here to Pasadena. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.”
*Pause for all of my Californian readers to emit a hollow, hacking laugh of bitter mockery.*
Roger briefly makes an appearence in the middle of Doom’s speech and promptly gets a ton bricks dropped on him…
…and he and Jessica are tied up while Doom turns the machine on.
It looks like that’s all folks, so Jessica tells Roger that she loves him “more than any woman’s ever loved a rabbit.”
Do0m trips on some plastic eyeballs, which causes the weasels to break their shit laughing. Doom yells at them to stop laughing (because weasels famously die if they laugh too much. Commonly known fact.)
Eddie remembers that greedy property developers have one weakness: Dance! He puts on a big song and dance number complete with backflips from his circus days which drives the weasels into hysterics of laughter and OH NO I FORGOT LAUGHTER IS CONTAGIOUS!
The weasels snuff it and Eddie races to turn off the dip machine but Doom re-appears. Eddie and Doom battle with the various toon props lying around the factory which ends with Doom getting stuck to the wheel of an oncoming steamroller with superglue and then ohhhhhhhhhh God.
Ahem.
So you remember how I’ve mentioned that I was a nervous kid as a child? Yeah, there’s a reason my parents didn’t let me watch this movie until I was on the north side of puberty.
So first of all, you straight up see a screaming man flattened by a steam roller. They don’t cut away or anything, you see the whole thing. Then, the compressed corpse of that man springs up and starts flopping around like a human slinky. And then his eyes pop out and he starts SCREAMING! LIKE!!! THIIIIIIIIISSS!!!
…
…
Eddie cops that Marvin Acme wrote his will in disappearing ink and asks Roger to read Jessica the love letter he wrote her. Roger realises halfway through that there’s a lot more “hereafter’s” and “aforementioned’s” than he remembered writing and discovers that it’s actually Acme’s will which leaves Toon Town to the Toons.
And so our movie ends with a big happy dance party because Jeffrey Katzenberg was involved in this and there are rules.
***
Who Framed Roger Rabbit opened at number one, received near-universal critical acclaim, kick-started the Disney renaissance, re-ignited interest in classic animation, swept the Academy awards, closed the whole in the ozone layer, reunited East and West Germany and cured several forms of cancer. It’s really, really, really good. One of those rare films where all the elements work perfectly. If you’re an animation fan, a movie fan or a mammal with working eyeballs, you owe it to yourself to see this film.
Loved the review, Mouse. I so adore this movie it’s not funny.
(RIP Hoskins)
Thanks man.
“unshavedmouse yor sins are remembered pray”
How ominous.
Huh?
Despite its importance to the animation medium I have never even thought of watching this.
you should. it’s on netflix.
Start thinking.
Between exams and sports I finally got around to watching it. I really loved the scenes where the cartoon gun was introduced, Eddy dumped out the alcohol , and of course Eddy’s dance and song.
Welcome back, Mouse!
I’m not among the crowd that loves this movie. For whatever reason, I simply like it. I agree that Roger can get annoying, and that’s what kind of turned me off the first time I saw it. I gave the movie another chance and grew to like it more.
Everyone, time to celebrate.
MOUSE IS BACK!!!!!!
(Mexican Hat Dance music plays in the background)
Good to see you back Mouse, cool review of one of the greatest movies of our time. It must have been a pain in the neck to write because there’s so much in this movie to talk about. Just to let you know, we appreciate it.
Well all right then.
Nice to see you back, unshavedmouse!
I saw this movie years ago and remember thinking it overrated. But, I feel I need to see it again now that I’m older and more mature (cough).
And I think you’re missing a “u” in your secret “yor”.
What what?
thanks buddy
Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii fiiiiiiiiiiiixed iiiiiiiiiitttttttt….
Welcome back, Mouse! And a great review to boot.
Quick question that came to mind: which duo of Disney directors do you prefer? Kirk Wise and Gary Trousedale (Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Atlantis) or John Musker and Ron Clements (Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, and Princess and the Frog)? I didn’t include The Great Mouse Detective because it had other directors as well. I’m only listing movies directed SOLELY by the respective director duos. So which team of directors do you prefer and why?
If anyone else wants to answer this question as well, feel free.
Wise and Trousdale. I still can’t believe they did Atlantis though. Wasted potential of a film.
Musker and Clements by a whisker.
Yep, this is one of my favorite movies. On top of the brilliant script, stunning animation and fantastic cast, I really like the concept of cartoon characters being real people that we can interact with.
Next time: Oh, this oughta be fun/depressing
“Lloyd channels all 1.21 giggawatts of his incredible charismatic energy into investing Doom with a sinister, crackling malevolence that bubbles right under the surface until finally bursting forth in all its horror.” THAT GOT ME LAUGHING FOR HOURS! XD
Well, what else can I say, Mouse? I love every bit of this movie and every bit of your review! Great that you are back. :’)
So, I’m from Los Angeles, and yeah, there’s a lot of things in this movie that crack me the hell up because of how ironic they are now. Best public transportation system in the world! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. It took my parents an hour and 45 minutes to drive to LAX last week. That drive normally takes half an hour with light traffic. Absolutely ridiculous.
I think the greatest compliment I can give Bob Hoskins is that he almost made the Super Mario Bros Movie worth watching. He was a truly great actor and he is sorely missed.
I think that given the film was made in 1988, it was purposefully ironic.
All right, I’m won over. That’s one more movie on the “list of movies to watch”.
Also, no traffic jams in Los Angeles…ha…ha ha…
(I know you made that joke already, Mouse, but seriously. One hour there, ninety minutes back. For what /should/ be thirty minutes. And this is just on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I am not the first nor the only one to suspect that the LA freeway system is actually a summoning grid of steel and concrete, made to harvest our despair to call forth Nyarlathotep.)
On a slightly different track, Mouse, the copy-editing on this review could do with some work. I see a couple of slight typos, grammatical hiccups, missing spaces between sentences: just enough to be noticeable. The only other review here I could remember with that problem was Wreck-It Ralph.
I assure you, it is not the only review with that problem. Workload has been pretty heavy recently so I didn’t get much of a chance for a polish this time around.
Hey, great to see you back on here. Hope the play is going very well.
Funny enough, I first watched this movie on TV when I was 13, and caught the very last part of the film, so the spoiler of Doom being a toon passed through me. Took me a second viewing to see the film all completed. He didn’t scare me as a toon, but then again I never got the movie as a child except for owning a vhs copy of all three roger rabbit shorts. Weird, hu?
Quick questions: first off, what are your thoughts on the infamous vagina shot in the original cut of the movie? And secondly, it sounds like you’re going to be watching the Mirimax version of Thief. But will you also be looking at the Recobbled cut of the film on youtube for comparissons? If so, I recommend the most recent: the Mark 4 version, since it’s, so far, the most complete of the film. Just wondering, that’s all. Anyways, happy to see you on once again.
I’ll be making mention of it but reviewing two movies side by side would just take two much time (though I’ll probably watch Mark 4 for reference). Couldn’t really think of anything funny/interesting to say about Vaginagate (plus it’s not in the DVD) so I just left it out.
Huh, didn’t know the “man” thing…good that they didn’t go there.
Did you ever notice that the passing train in the end show a bunch of shadow figure in very disturbing poses?
Either way, I love the movie for the animation, but especially for Jessica Rabbit, I like the character so much, she was one of the first who got a “Honoring the Heroine” article from me.
I finally got round to watching it only about a month ago so I’m glad I did before this review. One of your best and funniest yet
I haven’t seen this one in a while, but right now all I remember about this movie is… didn’t Chuck Jones once call it an affront to animation itself?
He hated it, yeah.
Ugh, why do the makers of some of my childhood favorites have to be in the minority?
Did he ever say exactly why?
That’s pretty rich considering what he did to Tom and Jerry.
Aw. I kind of liked his Tom and Jerry cartoons. I liked their detail, their storylines, and the fact that each of them had its own separate musical leitmotif.
So, Mouse, if you are unaware, here in the States tonight, NBC is airing “Peter Pan Live,” a live performance of the Peter Pan musical. I am currently watching it. It is pretty awful. However, it has CHRISTOPHER GODDAM WALKEN as Captain Hook. THAT is wonderful.
Just thought you might like to know
I don’t know. I thought it was decent. I liked Wendy. And yes, of course, Walken (though the other pirates were good too).
I remember watching this as a kid. We even had one of those kiddie books accompanying it with the cassette tape that had Roger Rabbit narrating and chiming to turn the page. Truth be told, though, while my brother and I enjoyed it as children, this movie really wasn’t made for anyone under the age of 12. It’s astonishing how many adult jokes and innuendos they have hidden in here; enough to give movies like “Shrek” a run for their money.
It is fascinating seeing a world where cartoon characters are real, and you’re right, it was downright brilliant how the villain was portrayed, because at first you just think he’s a HUMAN villain, but he’s actually a cartoony misanthrope (towards his fellow toons) who’s committing genocide. Normally I like Christopher Lloyd, though some of his characters are downright nasty, and this was one of them.
I have to tell ya, that scene where he kills the poor little shoe with the dip really tore me up as a kid. To hear its piteous whines and wails as it dies is awful to listen to.
I do like Jessica Rabbit, but like many girls, it’s for her personality, not her looks. I liked that she actually cared about Roger and wanted to do the right thing. I’ve always wondered how she kept those dresses up, hehe. (Glue? Tape?) Plus it was funny hearing both the human and toon men go nuts over her. Azalea’s Dolls has a dress-up game of her on their site (sorry Mouse, it’s kid-friendly). It took me many years to figure out she was (and still is) a sex icon. There’s even some crazy (and very ugly) British Woman who took on the look and personality of Jessica Rabbit, though she kind fails spectacularly.
That was actually kinda silly when Roger sees the pictures of his wife playing patty-cake with that studio guy. All they’re doing is playing patty-cake! They don’t even have their clothes off! And yet Roger acts like he’s seen them naked in bed together and/or kissing. Dumb.
With that beginning cartoon, it’s like, you’re watching the cartoon, and then it’s abruptly over and you’re mentally asking, “Where’s the rest? Why did it stop?” I actually read over on TV Tropes that “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” was meant to start a franchise, but I guess it didn’t sit well with the audience in terms of a “family” franchise (again, it’s not really all that kid-friendly). Too bad. It would have been fascinating to see where it would have gone.
Roger Rabbit’s more goofy than annoying to me. And you know, I thought for a few years that ALL toons couldn’t handle alcohol, but perhaps it’s just Roger. I once watched a tv special in the 90s that was hosted by some people who had the voice actor for Roger with them, and he, of course, had a ball. (He sounds a lot like Billy Crystal, but isn’t him).
It actually did start a franchise (sort of). There were three shorts made and shown before certain movies (they’re all on the DVD). But there just wasn’t a way to make shorts profitable anymore.
Oh come on, animation may have had problems in the United States during the 80s, but in Japan, it was thriving. It was the time of Studio Ghibli’s founding, anime like Fist of the North Star, Captain Tsubasa, Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya, the time when OVAs started appearing, when Akira was made, as well as Gundam, or the anime that was adapted into Voltron. It was one of the most creative decades for Japanese animation.
Yeeees…that’s why I specifically said “American animation” in the intro.
One of the things I like the best about your reviews is that they make me go and seek out these movies. This movie has been on my list for years, but when I saw your review posted, I simply had to go and finally see it because I wanted to appreciate all the jokes. So thank you for that. Great review as always and it’s good to have you back.
Great to be back, and thank you. Hope you enjoyed it.
The movie? Oh, absolutely. It’s a great story and the animation techniques pulled off are simply phenomenal. The first few times a live-action actor picked up an animation or vice versa, my jaw literally dropped. Nowadays CGI is so common and so well blended in that you kind of forget how hard it must be both for the animators and for the actors to meet in the middle without ever, you know, physically meeting.
Though I must admit that this was one of those movies that are so universally known that you kind of know how the movie will go without ever having seen it. You get spoiled by simply living in the Western culture. So I already knew Doom was a Toon, which took away a little, but it’s still a minor complaint.
Something to look out for the next time you see it. When Eddie holds the toon gun when he’s talking to Jessica in toon town, it’s not actually animated. It’s just a really cartoony looking big plastic gun.
I actually did notice that the first time through. Another thing was when Eddie gets thrown out of the club by the gorilla bouncer, he’s obviously hanging from wires, but that’s all part of the charm nowadays, as far as I’m concerned.
“The scene where Doom dips the shoe is one of the most notorious in the whole movie because, while good cartoon characters certainly do die, it’s never the cute little ones.”
This scene is actually why I can’t watch the movie. I’m not sure why but it’s way too visceral and legitimately upsets me.
I actually taught a class on this film in college! But I approached it with a different set of analysis criteria, as the course was on film noir.
One of my fellow students and I – having burned through every other film course offered by our university – were tasked by our professor with presenting and leading discussion on two films. The films we chose needed to typify neo-noir and modern noir. We decided to split the workload in half; she took modern noir and showed the class Se7en, and neo-noir became my focus. I’m not sure if you know this, but the world of neo-noir is filled mostly with awful films. Eventually, I settled on Klute (1971). I must confess: Having seen that movie three times in preparing for the class, I now know what experiencing a truly terrible film feels like. But, for the sake of the course, Klute perfectly exhibited every aspect of neo-noir, so, thankfully, the class discussion pretty much wrote itself.
But then, inspiration struck! Why not set up a special meeting time and show a film that served as the transition point between neo- and modern noir (and also allow me to study an interesting and enjoyable film instead of muted, LSD-fueled drivel)? The film that sat squarely on that mid-point…? You guessed it! It was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And what a great analysis that was! The other student and I enjoyed the heck out of our time spent studying and teaching on this film, primarily because it’s not only an amazing neo/modern noir, but also an amazing animated film. Literally, the best of both worlds.
Great review, as always, Mouse. Keep up the great work!
Thanks!
Huh, never saw this review, nice! Agree that Hoskins was robbed!