![]() ![]() ![]() At the request of Robert Zemeckis, London-based animator Richard Williams became the (albeit reluctant) Director of Animation on the film, and was the driving force behind many of the innovative techniques used throughout. Jessica Rabbit’s performance at the Ink and Paint Club is memorable for many reasons, but few people know that the design of her skin, hair, and dress were all separately animated, with at least three different layers to create the sparkling effect on her dress. willingness to spend big was a huge part of the quality of the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit given the complexity of all the different elements. Other touches, like the animated reflection in the wooden floor, were almost unheard of due to the extra time (and, therefore, cost) of animating these frames. In Something’s Cookin’, the cartoon short that opens the movie (itself a throwback to the cartoon pre-features in early theatres), Roger’s eye-popping and jaw-dropping reaction to Baby Hermann’s escape is done in classic Tex Avery style and signals the start of a comic cause-and-effect sequence popularised by silent film icons such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. animator Tex Avery (a legend of the “Golden Age” ’40s and ’50s animation) was another source of inspiration. ![]() cartoons and the stark urban sets featured in films like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Chinatown (1974). The team of animators behind the film were inspired by the early ’30s and ’40s Warner Bros. The introduction scene to Jessica Rabbit is a masterclass in blending live action and animation. Disney had made combined live-action and animation feature-length movies before, including Mary Poppins (1964) and Pete’s Dragon (1977), but no one had managed to capture the unique charm of cartoons, the grittiness of ’40s crime noir plus the overall realism seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. As the swinging light throws shadows around the entire room, the animators went the extra mile and incorporated multiple frames of light and shadow into Roger’s design – a huge amount of work that few people outside the industry would even notice. At the time, the complex animated scenes shattered expectations of what animation could do and the film even generated its own industry phrase to express going above and beyond the creative call of duty – “Bumping the lamp,” comes from the scene where Eddie hits his head on a low-hanging lamp while handcuffed to Roger. Impressively, there is no computer-generated trickery – all of the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit was done by hand, an impressive feat by any standards. Thirty-two years after its release, the film’s animated scenes still stand up, but who was behind the painstaking animated work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and what did it take to put our favourite characters on the big screen?Īll of the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit was done by hand, an impressive feat by any standards. If you ever enjoyed a moment of idle fantasy in which you wondered what life would be like if cartoons were real, then naturally the zany and occasionally raunchy antics of the toons in Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) was going to work for you. If there’s anything that gets a child’s imagination going it’s the magical combination of live-action with animation, seamlessly blended to create as much suspended disbelief as possible. ![]()
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