It isn’t hard to apply the Toons’ predicament to real life, to those once considered good enough to perform in clubs but not to eat or drink in them, whose choices were to be in the spotlight or in the kitchen those who must live in sealed-off ghettos on land controlled by others. These Toons cast real shadows-in more than one sense of the word. And if, as kids sometimes do, they try to find a flaw in the execution, they won’t be able to. ![]() Kids will gawk at the trick itself, at animated penguin waiters balancing real trays and cartoon characters waving real guns, while Eddie Valiant loads Yosemite Sam’s whopping animated pistol whose bullets have faces and voices and a will of their own. “Roger Rabbit” has a different fascination for each age. (Hoskins must have a cast-iron imagination to carry off this delicately calibrated interaction with every size and variety of Toon, from a rabbit in his bed, to an 8-foot gorilla looming menacingly over his shoulder, to a seductress with Gloria Grahame’s mouth and Jayne Mansfield’s silhouette.) We believe that when a seedy gumshoe, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), walks onto the Maroon lot he has to squeeze by a tutu-ed Toon hippo on the stairs and avoid getting his feet wet as a squad of brooms from “Fantasia” scrub down a sound stage. Within 10 more minutes, we have accepted humans criss-crossing into Roger’s world, the second-class, metaphoric world of the Toons-animated stars, contract players and bit actors who work at Hollywood’s Maroon Studios in 1947. Rabbit himself, driving his human director nuts because Roger sees tweeting birds instead of stars when a refrigerator drops on his head. ![]() In less than four minutes we are introduced to a hapless “actor,” the (very) animated R. What’s amazing about “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (selected theaters), a sort of inked-in film noir with outrageous sight gags, is how quickly we begin to accept the miracle in front of our eyes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |