Who Framed Roger Rabbit opens with an animated short ("Somethin's Cookin'") starring Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) and Baby Herman (Lou Hirsch) in which Roger, sitting for the lady of the house, is thwarted in his attempts to stop his goo-goo'ing charge from climbing the refrigerator. You'd hardly know it, but we're seeing these characters for the first time--and the ineffable period authenticity of "Somethin's Cookin'", a cartoon commissioned specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, betrays the scrupulous hand of Robert Zemeckis almost immediately. "Somethin's Cookin'" is drawn in Bob Clampett's elastic style; later, when Bugs Bunny makes an appearance in the feature proper, he's the Tex Avery Bugs with a sloped head. (Although this is slightly outdated, only cameos by the Mary Poppins penguins truly threaten anachronism, since the film proper is set in 1947.) The prologue ends prematurely when Roger sees bluebirds instead of stars--in the picture, cartoons are shot on soundstages: Roger Rabbit exists for real, as do Mickey Mouse, Bugs, et al, and they hail from a Hollywood subdivision called Toontown.

Toontown functions, more or less, as Chinatown does in Roman Polanski's film of the same name: private detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) avoids it like the plague. He used to help out 'toons in need, but then one dropped a piano on his brother's head; Toontown in his mind has come to stand for the heart of darkness. Valiant is roped into this otherworld at some point, natch, and its Silly Symphony dementia exceeds our wildest expectations, though Peter S. Seaman and Jeffrey Price's clumsy script doesn't quite finish mythologizing the place as Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne do with their fatalistic showdown on the streets of Chinatown. Yet Toontown's thematic potency is not compromised by the sequence's failure to do much other than bounce Eddie around like a pinball bearing. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has written, the 'toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit are isolated, second-class citizens facing genocide thanks to a plot to sacrifice Toontown for a freeway (Seaman and Price have admitted to cribbing Chinatown's water works scandal in revising Gary K. Wolf's book Who Censored Roger Rabbit)--in addition to studio politics and a just-developed method of killing 'toons known as "The Dip," a mixture of acetate, benzene, and turpentine that dissolves otherwise indestructible beings.

In fact, with cel animation on the verge of extinction, the genocide parallel holds more currency today than it did at the time of the film's release, when critics linked Toontown to everything from pre-civil rights Harlem to Auschwitz. And the resurrection of Who Framed Roger Rabbit now, on DVD, only shames the CGI alternative: the picture's integration of hand-drawn characters and environments into the realm of live-action feels so serendipitous (as opposed to fabricated) that it mops the floor with the comparatively inorganic Episode II, whose M.O. is, after all, essentially the same as Who Framed Roger Rabbit's.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a comedy, to be sure, but it's also a bona fide film noir, all slat lighting and tilted fedoras, complete with a hard-living antihero, Valiant, reluctantly pulled back into the life as Roger Rabbit becomes his client (and all-purpose sidekick); a femme fatale in the form of Roger's sultry cartoon wife, Kathleen Turner-voiced Jessica Rabbit (whose hourglass figure helps to indulge Zemeckis' obsession--at peak in Back to the Future Part II--with cleavage); and a Nazi-inspired villain, Judge Doom (an unsettling Christopher Lloyd), bent on the subversion of justice. (Or does Doom's secret identity more closely align him with the Jewish Police?) In one scene that verifies the film's integrity to adult viewers, Doom demonstrates The Dip on a cute "squeaking shoe," melting it slowly to savour its tortured shrieking. In another, worth mentioning because it's the apotheosis of the film's clever, confident eccentricity, Doom lures Roger out of hiding by tapping the walls rhythmically while whispering the song no 'toon can resist, "Shave and a Haircut." Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the film no serious movie lover can resist.

After Disney realized that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was going to bring them a healthy return on their investment, they commissioned the first of three Roger Rabbit shorts distinct from the motion picture, Tummy Trouble, which was attached to prints of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in 1989. Directed by future Lion King/Stuart Little helmer Rob Minkoff, the short--hospital setting aside--slavishly mirrors the structure of the feature film's introductory cartoon, right down to a live-action closer with a hothead director. The imitation continued to progressively paling returns with Minkoff's Rollercoaster Rabbit (which accompanied Dick Tracy) and finally Barry Cook's Trail Mix-Up (A Far Off Place), the latter of which attempts to compensate for its tired excuse for wit--is there a petition I can sign to ban Mt. Rushmore gags?--with several one-frame Disney cameos. Though Tummy Trouble looks overmatted, all three of these shorts sport top-drawer 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers and 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtracks, easing the pain of their disappointment. Tummy Trouble - **1/2 (out of four); Rollercoaster Rabbit - **; Trail Mix-Up - *1/2

Zemeckis, producer Frank Marshall, the screenwriters, producer Steve Starkey, and visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston band together for a feature-length yakker that is thankfully not another of Zemeckis' makeshift commentaries cobbled from college Q&As. Almost every question I had about the film was answered between this and the "Toontown Confidential" pop-up trivia, first and foremost why there's no question mark at the end of the picture's title, though the fact-track fails to point out in explaining the genesis of Doom's front company "Cloverleaf," a screenwriter's invention, that Cloverleaf is a Canadian distributor of tuna--with a logo identical to the one on display in Who Framed Roger Rabbit!

Zemeckis and co. introduce a finished rendition of the deleted Pig Head Sequence, an unpleasant and ultimately meaningless bit of business that would have sent Valiant into Toontown so early in the action as to subvert the climax. Valiant Files, complete with a handy cheat-sheet, leads us to gallery layouts for Character Development, Production Art (check out the rare sketches of Donald Duck by none other than Chuck Jones, a non-Disney artist), The Art of Roger Rabbit, promotional material (the decided-upon poster was awfully bland in relation to the one-sheet prototypes revealed here), and theme park designs (the Roger Rabbit attractions at Disney World and Disneyland). Before & After (3 mins.) compares dailies of Valiant's ride into Toontown to the finished product, while Toon Stand-Ins (3 mins.) offers a glimpse of the rehearsals where rubber figures filled in for Roger and company.

Behind the Ears (37 mins.) is a great, uncredited documentary recounting the nuts and bolts of the production, interspersing behind-the-scenes footage from 1987 with new interviews. Everyone remembers and applauds Zemeckis' decision to film Who Framed Roger Rabbit without being too conscientious of the animation-to-be, as it avoided the stiff, static quality of such similar efforts as Pete's Dragon. Supervising animator Richard Williams remembers with a chuckle yelling "Draw faster!" down the hallway to his team, while Zemeckis equates the whole experience to "watching grass grow." There's even a section covering, albeit cursorily, Alan Silvestri's complex score. A 5-minute montage of outtakes of Benny the Cab tearing up the highway (On Set) rounds out Disc Two and this magnificent set, packaged with "autographed" photos of Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit plus an insert booklet and a rebate coupon for owners of the previous movie-only Who Framed Roger Rabbit DVD.-Bill Chambers

*Much of Who Framed Roger Rabbit was shot in 65mm VistaVision to reduce the amount of image degradation that would occur during the opticals-heavy post-production process.

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
104 minutes
MPAA
PG
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced/
Pan-and-scan 1.33:1
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English DTS 5.1 (Disc Two only),
French Mono,
Spanish Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
2 DVD-9s
Region One
Touchstone

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WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
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Published: March 17, 2003