Like “2001,” “Close Encounters” and “E.T.,” this movie is not only great entertainment but a breakthrough in craftsmanship - the first film to convincingly combine real actors and animated cartoon characters in the same space in the same time and make it look real.
I’ve never seen anything like it before. Roger Rabbit and his cartoon comrades cast real shadows. They shake the hands and grab the coats and rattle the teeth of real actors. They change size and dimension and perspective as they move through a scene, and the camera isn’t locked down in one place to make it easy, either - the camera in this movie moves around like it’s in a 1940s thriller - and the cartoon characters look three-dimensional and seem to be occupying real space.
In a way, what you feel when you see a movie like this is more than appreciation. It’s gratitude. You know how easy it is to make dumb, no-brainer action movies, and how incredibly hard it is to make a movie like this, where every minute of screen time can take days or weeks of work by the animators. You’re glad they went to the trouble.
The movie is a collaboration between Disney Studios and Steven Spielberg, the direction is by Robert (“Back to the Future”) Zemeckis, and the animation is by Richard Williams. They made this a labor of love.
How did they do it? First, they plotted every scene, shot by shot, so that they knew where the live actors would be, and where the animated characters would be. Then they shot the live action, forcing actors such as Bob Hoskins, the star, to imagine himself in a world also inhabited by cartoons (or “Toons,” as the movie calls them). Then they laboriously went through the movie frame by frame, drawing in the cartoon characters. This is not a computer job. Real, living animators did this by hand, and the effort shows in moments like the zowie zoom shots where the camera hurtles at Roger Rabbit and then careens away, with the rabbit changing size and perspective in every frame.
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