Roger Rabbit Returns!…?
With original writer and director, maybe mo-cap
When I was little, playing in the family room of my grandmother’s house, there was usually 1 of 5 movies on in the background: My Girl, Sister Act, Curly Sue, Ghost Dad or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After so many years though, movies you watched when you were little start lumping together into a kind of sub-category. They actually start to become their own nostalgia and you maybe take for granted that anything you used to watch back when you were a kid was just that–a kid’s movie, corny and classic but never actually any good.
That’s how it went with me, anyway. Until I came across Roger Rabbit on TV one night years later and kept it on for the memories. I was shocked to find it different than I remembered, different than I left it. This wasn’t just a simple nostalgia pick, this movie was awesome! This weird and incredible stylistic mix of film noir and colored pencil. Heavy shadows and cigar-smoking babies. Weasles in double-breasted trench coats and a hard-boiled private eye. Fedoras and gin together with a “bad guy” who’d kill cartoons–literally kill them–by lowering their bodies into toxic vats of what he called “dip.” And this would disintegrate them, wisps of steam from their dematerialized carcasses wafting from the bubbling green slime.
Even at 22 it scared the hell out of me.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit to me is one of those true pieces of rare movie magic, capturing a sense of everything that cinema is capable of similar to ways The Wizard of Oz did or Willy Wonka, of stealing you, just for an hour or two, showing you something unbelievable but making you believe it. And there’s a grown-up quality about all of it, too. So much of what they get away with would never fly in a more modern animated film geared at least in part toward children.
So a sequel. The great innovator Robert Zemeckis, with titles like Back to the Future, Beowulf and the upcoming A Christmas Carol to his credit, has announced that recent advancements in animation have given him a good idea for a second installment of RR, one that doesn’t rule out the use of 3D motion capture. The characters from the original won’t be dimensionalized, he says (thank God), but maybe others will, or maybe the 2D models will be animated through motion capture? For a fuller look at Zemeckis’ hinting go HERE.
The point is, it’s in the works, with original writers Peter Seaman and Jeffrey Price working on a script even as we speak. And there’s definitely a lot to be excited about. A sequel like this could very well set another standard for what’s possible in animation, incorporating these new elements. But lightning…it usually doesn’t strike twice. Back to the Future II is kind of barely passable, so is Ghostbusters II and so many other second attempts at real, inspired life. And if the edge is taken away from something like this to make it more PC, if the bad guy stops melting toons and starts just locking them up, if you take away the drinking and the smoking and the sex jokes, then all you’d have is annoying Roger Rabbit and some cutesie CG talking animals. And that would be bad, the dead returning to life but with bolts in its neck, loose stitching barely keeping it all from falling apart.
But hey, as long as the sultry Jessica Rabbit’s in the picture I’m on board. What a fox. That she would ever waste her time with that Roger character is simply laughable, I’m sorry. Talk about unrealistic.
Enjoy the trailer for the original embedded below and keep your fingers crossed for #2. Here’s to novelty.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under film, trailers/news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
