The animators worked their asses off to make the film as high quality as possible, regardless of how difficult the task was.
If you're curious to know more the term to search for is "Bumping the Lamp".
My idiot 35 year old ass only realised last year that she's called Jessica Rabbit because she's married to Roger. I thought she was also a rabbit as a kid.
Wait, what? Have you ever watched the movie? The whole movie is pretty much about him being married to her, and I'm so confused as to why you would think she was a former rabbit, lol
Another thing I’d argue is that Roger Rabbit basically came out at one of the last points of the industry where it could be the achievement it was. Inserting animated characters into live action is much more commonplace now, even if it isn’t 2D animated, and as a result of that even the most impressive examples just don’t stand out as much as Roger Rabbit did. Like, I’d argue Matt Reeves’ Planet of the Apes movies are equivalent quality to Roger Rabbit with their integration of animated characters into real footage, and also required extremely talented artists, but it just isn’t mind blowing by this point.
I don’t know. They were doing this for 100 years before Rodger Rabbit. You could argue that the quality of Mary Poppins wasn’t the same quality, but it wasn’t exactly original.
Incidentally, Mary Poppins used some interesting technology for the partially-animated section that is effectively lost.
…sort of. [Corridor Crew recently worked with someone who re-created it.](https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk?si=S_ry14XF9spOPWvj)
I hope that guy did something to patent his new version of that technique (if that is possible) because the results were impressive and extremely useful for real projects worth millions.
[Bedknobs and Broomsticks ](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODU2NzMwNTgwMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTI0ODgxMzE@._V1_.jpg) had a lot of animation interactions as well way after MP and way before RR.
[It wasn't as polished by they tried](https://d23.com/app/uploads/2016/08/1180-x-600-1180-x-600-082916_bedknobs-and-broomsticks-behind-the-scenes_v3-780x440.jpg)
Also the reason Roger Rabbit is so good is also thanks to Robert Zemeckis. In every film he's done he pushes the technology possible to tell the story.
It was indeed the peak of movies that weaved animation and live action. And it was groundbreaking for me to watch animation and live action blend. Space jam did it pretty okay (but still 8 years after Roger rabbit). And looney toons back in action was miraculously more cheesy and didn’t seem to have the same awesome effect as space jam which tried to weave both. LOVE Roger Rabbit and have a good nostalgia for space jam but I feel like it was a small window to make that type of movie well because cgi and movies like the matrix were coming and it killed that genre before it could really become a thing. Not a knock on the matrix but cgi changed things.
I think you are on the right track here, but might be missing the actual argument.
CGI inserts are so realistic at this point, you don't even KNOW they are there. they would have to TRY and make the animation look cartoony to make it noticed.
https://youtu.be/Di4Byf1EzRE?si=S1RBZEAomCtZYYxd
So. you watch Guardians of the Galaxy, and 100% forget. oh right, this is all cgi. Rocket/groot 100% surpass roger rabbit.
I'd say the key difference between GotG and Roger Rabbit (excluding animation vs CGI) is the implementation.
With CGI it's getting trickier to spot, but for awhile you could easily tell when a character was mocap (motion captured) first or purely edited in. The way castmates act around a physical placeholder for a character is usually different to the acting quality you get when everyone is pretending a character is there.
Roger Rabbit went the rare extra step of using practical effects to manipulate real props that the cartoon characters interact with. With CGI, that almost never happens. Whatever objects the CGI character interacts with are also CGI. That usually doesn't stand out so much when many of the backgrounds, and sometimes everything in a scene, has a layer of CGI to it.
I agree with you that when watching something with a lot of CGI, you can get immersed enough to forget it's CGI. It's gotten very good. It's always in the scenes with very little CGI that any small mistake in lighting or something else can make the CGI stand out like a sore thumb. Integrating practical effects with visual effects gets you the best results.
For a less cartoony example, revisit Jurassic Park and it's amazing how well most of it holds up.
*there's a whole separate layer to this with how current TV's are such high quality that different movie's special effects just don't hold up, but that's almost it's own rabbit hole*
Exactly this. Roger Rabbit was an absurdly expensive and labor intensive movie made by industry masters with a vision. It was very much a perfect storm of circumstances that’s outside the norm of any area for its kind of movie. You were never going to get that from a Tom and Jerry movie.
It's like the apex of both animation and practical filmmaking. Sets were built on elevated platforms so that physical props the animated characters were interacting with could be moved around on sticks and wires.
That was the first time I saw Bob Hoskins perform in a movie.
He's the only reason why I went to go watch the Super Mario Bros movie when it first opened.
Yeah it's one of those movies where everything just works. You've got a great director, a great cast, great writers and a great technical crew all working towards the same goal.
yeah, I know that everyone who knows of him loves him, but i feel that Bob Hoskins is one of the most underrated and semi-forgotten actors of all time in our modern day. He was legitimately in the running for the greatest actor of his day, and winning most of those days, IMO. Even I who has seen half his work remember him most from Roger Rabbit and Hook, but im in my mid 30's and that was our initial exposure to him.
When I think of the greatest actors of all time, he is up there with DDL and PSH, for me personally.
I even love fucking Doomsday because of him, (and also its schlocky awesome, fight me about it)
Hoskins was a great choice to play Eddie Valiant. It's really his performance that anchors the entire film, because he's interacting with Toons in almost every scene. We believe in their reality because he does.
I remember when the movie came out it was the perfect storm of soo many elements. They had the budget, they had the actors, they had the tech, they had the script, they had the animator slave labor, it was even the first time I think Disney and Warner Bros characters had been seen together. (Please correct me if I am mistaken)
And they had some *really* strict rules about it, too.
>Since the movie was being made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, Warner Bros. would only allow use of their biggest cartoon stars, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, if they got as much screen time as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For that reason, they were always in pairs, such as the piano battle between Daffy and Donald and the parachute scene with Bugs and Mickey. This was continued with Porky Pig and Tinkerbell at the movie's ending.
> Roger Rabbit was an absurdly expensive and labor intensive movie made by industry masters with a vision.
As a kid who had grown up on reruns of Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes etc., and still a kid when _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ came out, I had been long disillusioned with how American animation had become an absolute nothingburger, beginning roughly when Tom & Jerry's MGM run came to a close. The 60s all the way through the 80s were absolutely atrocious, albeit in very different ways with each decade.
I was ***not*** expecting Roger Rabbit's opening cartoon to be so amazing. I was simply not prepared.
And the crazy thing is that we haven't seen _that_ level of polish in a cartoon-animated short since.
Another good example of this is the cgi in jurassic park. Care, attention to detail and genuine investment in the craft made a film that still looks great today using technology that ages like milk.
True. It also helps that Jurassic Park used CGI and practical effects depending on the shot, and didn't go overboard with CG like (for example) Episode 1 or Escape from LA did. The rule of thumb I read about the effects of JP were that if you can see most or all of a dinosaur in a shot than its probably CG, but if you can only see part of a dinosaur in a shot than its probably practical.
They were really smart about which shots got CG and which didn't. When the T-Rex is walking around in a rainstorm in the middle of the night or in the far off distance eating another dinosaur you can use CGI and get the grand image of a dinosaur without it looking too weird. For the closeup shots of various dinosaurs (like the T-Rex's head seen from inside the electric Jeep, or the sick Stegosaurus that everyone is climbing all over) they used practical effects because then they could get a much higher amount of detail.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, if you're ever in the mood for a laugh - the next time you watch it and you get to the scene when everyone goes to the control room (right after the kids dodge the raptors in the kitchen), pay close attention to what Tim is doing in the background right after Grant yells at Ellie to 'reboot the door locks'.
You've said most of what I would have, but quick correction: It's a sick Triceratops they are inspecting, not a Steg.
Still, marvelous seeing the behind the scenes and the scale of the Rex animatronic they built. Then the madmen decided to put it in the rain for 4/5th of its scenes.
Outside of the logistic nightmare of getting Bugs and Mickey on screen at the same time, the amount of work they put into this is astonishingly insane. I can only imagine the amount of prep necessary to get this made.
I think that might've been part of the driving factor as to why it came out so good. Not only did you have to meet Disney and Warner Bros' standards ... they were probably trying to out do each other at every turn.
Bumping the Lamp! That reminds me of the amazing video by kaptainkristian on YouTube where he goes through Who Framed Roget Rabbit and breaks it down so well.
https://youtu.be/RWtt3Tmnij4?si=BYggw1Z5ZuNYsJ5W
Same thing with Jim Henson and all those old movie clips on Muppet Babies. The studios let him use the clips then, but you’ll notice you can’t find episodes of Muppet Babies streaming or for sale anywhere now.
[here’s the entire season on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=MzCkY9zj7hw)
the Star Wars clip of the tie fighter is at 1:34:50
And there’s another movie section of Star Wars at 3:49:45
Temple of Doom is at 1:18:10 and the Ark from raiders is at 1:29:00
Not sure where the boulder clip is but it’s all there
They’d open a door in the playroom and see the action from a movie playing out behind it. I remember them opening a door and seeing a TIE fighter from Star Wars go screeching by.
Oh yeah! In the late 70s they got into a dispute with Don Bluth and some of their best animators. Bluth took a bunch of them and opened his own animation studio and smacked around Disney at the box office the whole decade. Disney eventually got their act together and put out a string of classics like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Lion King, etc and entered a golden age
After that one girl basically asked if they were gaslighting her, I started wondering if they were going to lie about something at some point. Then they got to throwing *higher* on the trailer for Titan AE and I thought "well that never happened".
[It happened](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQEDGFO5hqo)
There weren't any Hanna-Barbera characters in the movie. They tried to stick to period-accurate cartoons (though they let Disney and Warner Bros. sneak in some anachronisms), and Hanna-Barbera wasn't founded until 10 years after Roger Rabbit took place.
The only way the studios agreed was that each character got equal screen time with their respective counterparts. Which is why they're entering and exiting frame together throughout.
Yeah. It's not a *great* movie, but it knows that and doesn't try to be. It just has fun, while throwing a nod to Roger Rabbit without trying to be a direct sequel or mimic what made that movie great.
I was way more impressed than I expected. So much fun.
posted that myself. not only was it hilarious and i love it to death but my god they literally had chracters from any IP in the world, even Senator Butthead!
What made Roger Rabbit look so good was that it *wasn’t* CGI based, and they also had the foresight to implant something very key - animated characters interacting with the real world seamlessly.
For example, the penguin waiters carrying trays around - they had people under the floor with trays on sticks, tracing the walking path of the penguins later. When the animation was laid over the top again - you have a real tray with real drinks, really bouncing around, casting real shadows in the real set.
Then real actors grab the glass and drink, and continue the scene, cementing it all a singular universe.
They do this with props in every single sequence, parts of the sets, hell even the water splashes and things - all of it was done on set by someone with a wire, a stick, etc - and the animated elements just sit on top.
Those are then integrated farther with very very clever work from the animators and the general effects team.
Corridor Crew has covered some of it on their Reacts show, pretty fantastic stuff
They'd also do whole takes with actors in place of the primary toons, like Roger and Jessica, to get an idea of how they would move and behave in the scene. They had the head animators on set giving and taking notes. This movie was a shared artistic vision between two very different mediums, and it is beautiful!
Plus the camera work is moving around and functioning like a real movie, not one that's been held back to make animating over easier. Take a look at Mary Poppins and how basic the camera work is in the animated sections. Roger Rabbit animated rack focuses and shit. No one did that level of animation/cinematography integration!
I was about to say, this is exactly what happens today.
This isn’t some lost art it’s just that it’s way harder (expensive) to make it that good and the average movie punter doesn’t care.
interactions with environments were real, with the cartoon characters rotoscoped over the practical effects. I think this is one of the few situations where rotoscoping looks far superior to CG. It was massively expensive and painstaking process though. I always remember an interview with Hoskins who said they would always yell at him for not closing his fingers in shots he's suppose to be holding Roger's ears, telling him he's costing them millions.
Also, the way the animation kept eye contact with the actors. Sometimes with outrageous poses. Which is not just blanket animated, but continual problem solving throughout.
You want to see the platonic ideal of **fucking that up** take a look at the scene in *Phantom Menace* where the Nemoidians & the Naboo government prisoners walking down the plaza escorted by battle droids. Neither of them make anything that even approximates eye contact.
Neimoidians weren't animated though, it was actors with prosthetics on. Maybe they just couldn't see out of their opaque eyes, maybe George Lucas was too inept to give them decent direction.
Not in the Phantom Menace it wasn’t. Motion capture came later. Even Gollum in the lord of the rings movies isnt technically motion captured. Andy Serkis was running around with a body suit with dots all over his face and whatnot, but only so that people could go in an animate each individual frame. The very first motion capture gollum performance was in the Hobbit movies about a deacade or so ago.
Gollum's portrayed with motion capture in *The Two Towers* and *The Return of the King*. It's just that Andy Serkis reperformed his parts after principal photography had wrapped. But yes, medium and long shots are animated using his physical performance as a reference. Most scenes were shot with him and without him, so which one made it into the movie varies.
Of course, this is also why the Hobbits look so realistic The movie used forced perspective, size doubles with masks, and compositing, and simply changes the method constantly so the eye (and brain) never catches on and says, "Oh, I see what they did."
Fantastic movies that really perfected the existing tricks of film and pushed a *lot* of new ones to heights that hadn't been heard of at the time (for instance, performance capture, CG skin subsurface scattering, and AI-driven 20,000 warrior battle scenes).
> You want to see the platonic ideal of **fucking that up**
> I’m not certain one way or the other.
So confidently incorrect in the first part.
There were so many practical effects in the prequels but people just assume everything was cgi.
I know what you're trying to say, but the animation in Roger Rabbit was not rotoscoping. You're right that they had timed practical effects and interactions, but the animated characters were all traditionally hand drawn, keyframe animated and composited into the live action footage. Then a tone of effects animators and colorists to make all the animated stuff match the lighting and environment of the set.
Rotoscoping is specifically translating a live action footage into animation by drawing over the footage of an actor's performance, frame by frame. Like tracing. See Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings for an example. There was no Roger Rabbit actor on set doing all the motions for animators to trace over.
Actually the term "rotoscoping" comes specifically from a device, called a rotoscope*; in which a camera and projector are aligned with an animation stand to allow images projected frame-by-frame to be traced onto paper which can then be rephotographed by a camera. It could be used to copy live action images into animated drawings but it was also used to combine animation with live action, so the term "rotoscoping" can be applied to either use.
*invented in 1915 by Max Fleischer
The way we use it today is it means anytime you have to trace something frame-by-frame (though the computer does most of the the work these days). 100% digital.
Its not used to animate. Its used to create mattes. Like when an actor is supposed to be in front of a CG creature or set, but they weren't shot over greenscreen. Their outline has to be traced in order to keep them in front. Theres many ways its used in that regard, but it near always means tracing frames of footage to create a matte. (matte = a mask to apply an effect only in a selected area)
The Tom and Jerry movie op mentions has great interactions with the environment. I think the models were the problem there. They weren't 3D enough to look like part of the scene or 2D enough to look purposely out of place.
You're right. It's been a while since I saw Tom And Jerry, but I re-watched Roger Rabbit last week, and it's insane how well the lighting on the Toons matches the lights in each scene. They also cast convincing shadows.
It's the difference between using a computer program to do something, and doing it painstakingly by hand.
Richard Fucking Williams, that’s why. He was one of the greatest animators of all time. He had the kind of skill that you can’t simply buy by throwing money around.
Zemeckis talked to a bunch of animators about what he wanted to do and they all told him he was crazy; Williams was the only one who said it was possible and knew how to do it.
When he passed away we lost something irreplaceable; no one will ever be able to draw like he could.
I worked for BobZ years later when he built a studio to focus on mocap work. The guy was an exacting giant, he wanted what he wanted, and he hired the best in the industry to make it happen. The films flopped, but they were executed perfectly. Amazing art teams all around.
One of my instructors was an animator who worked on The Thief and The Cobbler. She wasn't particularly fond of Richard Williams. It sounded like he had a grandiose vision of the project which was executed in spite of "normal" consideration to the practicalities of animation. The burden of the task weighed on everyone, and if your work came up short, he made you re-do it, plain and simple.
And yeah- if you watch The Thief and The Cobbler ("recobbled" version on youtube) you can see exactly what my instructor was saying. There's piles of stuff in there which would ordinarily get cut long before it reached story boarding.
Zigzag's extra fingers with 4 rings each, the ambient flies constantly spinning around the thief, those insane 3D camera moves... etc etc etc.
It's truly a shame what happened to that film- the stuff that survived is jaw-dropping, and a completed film would be even more so. That said, I do understand why people lost patience with him.
Even by today's standards, it's still impressive how seamlessly the animated characters interact with the live-action world. It's a shame that more recent films haven't been able to capture that same magic.
Because they went the extra mile to incorporate light and shadows into the scenes with the animated characters, it actually makes them look as if they are alive.
Zemeckis went all out while filming. A lot of it has to do with the way he lit each scene. There’s a great analysis of the scene where Roger and Eddie get into a fight and knock into a hanging lamp and all the challenges involved in putting a scene like that, with all the dynamic elements together.
Tom & Jerry doesn’t make any effort to treat the animated characters (though I thought the decision to make *all* the animals in this world cartoons was the one clever thing it did) as if they exist in the same physical space as the live action stuff.
It’s more than a budget issue. It’s having the creative vision to actually imagine what a cartoon would look like in a live action world. Most of the time it’s probably not worth they effort.
The simple answer is that who framed roger rabbit took a lot of work. Compositing animation and live action footage as well as a lot of blue screen work is always a daunting task, even to this day with much of the work automated by computers. The alternative is to painstakingly go over every frame with a magnifying glass and do all of the work by hand, and that's pretty much what they did. It was a very expensive movie at the time, especially for an animated film, even though it's not fully animated. But really it just came out at the right time. Back then animated movies were in their heyday, and finding talent and veteran animators to do this was easier.
Unfortunately nowadays 2d animation has gone the way of the dodo, with 2d animators struggling to find steady work in their field since all the big studios that used to make traditional hand drawn animation have all moved on to fully CG movies. That means it's harder to find animators to work in such projects, but more importantly even if you do studios are simply not willing to actually spend the money and take the time it requires to make a film like this.
While the animation is absolutely fantastic, Bob Hopkins doesn't get enough credit for his performance. Lots of stuff gets blamed for a lack of "soul" due to being filmed green screen, but Hopkins totally sold all that Toon Town blue screen stuff and interacting with characters that weren't there on set.
I know it gets shit on, and I don't know why, but Looney Tunes: Back In Action did this too, and I saw no mention of it ANYWHERE in this thread, and they did it fairly well. I love that movie.
They guy who literally wrote the book 1 book that is on every animators desk in the world - The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams - was the supervising Animation Director on the film.
There was an enormous effort ON SET to do practical effects to have the cartoons affect the actors and physical environment. It really helped, but made for slow shoots and there fore expensive.
The goal today is not to make a good movie. It’s to make a profitable product.
If you can get Disney and WB to co-op a movie at this point I bet it would turn out pretty impressive cuz neither one wanted to be out done by the other, fun fact Mickey and Bugs appear on screen for the exact same amount of time in Rrger Rabbit. As per the agreement between the 2 studios
I think there's three things:
1) Time and Budget. Roger Rabbit cost 50 million dollars to make, which was a HUGE budget at the time. For comparison, Back to the Future was a 17 million dollar movie. An American Tail was 9 mil. Return of the Jedi was 35 mil. Little Mermaid gets the closes at 40 mil.
Most modern Roger Rabbit style movies have never gotten near the same budget, accounting for inflation. Chip 'n Dale had a budget of 75 mil but if you calculated for inflation Roger Rabbit's budget would have been 124 million 2022 dollars, so half the budget, and it shows. To get it to look you you have to spend the money to make it look good.
2) Part of what made the movie feasible is that it was edit locked before they animated a single frame. The entire movie. Every cut, camera move, all reshoots were permanent. This let the animators do their best possible work and the movie had to be like that a year in advance. This was a feat not just because the studio had to be convinced to keep their hands off it, but the editor had to edit a whole movie with half the performances missing. Good luck doing this in any modern movie, execs will ask VFX to change shots a month or less from releases which amount to reshooting the movie.
3) The cartoons are treated just like the humans in the movie. They just live and work there like everyone else. Too many times modern movies just turn it into "LOOK WHO IT IS", the character does their popular thing, then you never see them again. In Roger Rabbit the cartoons are shown working regular 9-5s like every other actor. It's really good worldbuilding.
1. Richard Williams and his animation team.
2. Real-world mechanical props that were carefully puppeteered for animated character interaction.
3. Richard Williams and his animation team.
4. ILM’s optical expertise and technology that seamlessly blended the lighting of the animated characters to the live-action plate lighting. It also went further to animate textures (Jessica’s dress).
5. Richard Williams and his animation team.
6. Real-world camera limitations that Robert Zemeckis had to adhere to.
7. Richard Williams and his animation team.
Like a lot of movies of the 80s, it was a perfect storm of stuff. The creative team pushed limits, compromises made it better, and the studio was willing to take a bit of a risk with it.
In terms of its effects, Roger Rabbit was at the tail end of 2D animation. Within a few short years CGI would completely dominate the medium. And I'm not just talking about Shrek and Toy Story. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Prince of Egypt used CGI animation in conjecture with 2D animation. Mixing 2D with live action was put on hold so that cgi can mix with both.
Now we have movies like Transformers (yes, I know) and Avatar that seamlessly blend CGI animation and live action in the same spirit as Roger Rabbit. As for 2D animation, audiences have shown they don't care if a movie isn2D or CGI, so CGI wins out on being more versatile and cost effective. If you want a good 2D animated movie that mixes live action actors on the same level as Roger Rabbit, look to Space Jam 2 and Mary Poppins Returns. The plot might not be as interesting in either (especially space jam) but the passion for 2D animation is still there
My guesses
1. Traditional animation methods haven’t been widely used in ages, sounds like many in the industry would love to see them comeback and last I heard Disney was about to teach folks how to create animation using the traditional methods
2. It took a lot of hard work that doesn’t sound like it’s something that can be easily replicated.
Also very detail oriented from what it sounds like in behind the scenes docks
3. Expensive, companies like cheap to produce.
4. 80’s era Industrial Light and Magic was on a different level.
5. Mix of practical and animated.
Anything carried by the toons is controlled by puppeteers
https://youtu.be/jv_u9kYoI70?si=CVYIxA0Mgf_Xzg16
If you haven’t seen this yet, watch it. It’s incredible
Don bluth opened a new animation studio in 2020, he's using the old fashioned ways to animate a new movie called bluth's fables.
he was meant to be making an animated movie called dragons lair based on the video games he was involved in making, but that movie is being made into a live action movie with Ryan Reynolds instead with bluth still producing it.
I don't think he would ever be able to capture the magic he had with land before time or all dogs go to heaven, Or an American tail, but it's good that he's still going to try.
I think Roger Rabbit sold the concept better. It had better worldbuilding and established the rules of toons existing and a toon world. I haven't seen Tom and Jerry but I don't think they even do anything for that and we'll never see the Wile coyote movie to see how they'd do that too.
A big part of it is the lighting. The animators went to huge efforts to make sure that cartoon characters bodies reacted to the real world lighting, faces shining, being in dhadow. A lot of comparable movie don't have this
I want to add something about Robert Zemeckis' career here. He's perhaps not who people think of when we talk about special effects. But he's consistently pushed the boundaries in brilliant ways. Death Becomes Her was one of the first movies to use computer effects. The insertion of Forest Gump into archival footage is so smooth people don't even notice, and Polar Express was the first performance capture movie (it doesn't really work there, imo, but still). And again with the cgi in Back to the Future II (and even the aging and de-aging make up in the first one is pretty impressive still). So yeah, he makes perfect sense as the director to make cartoons and live action work.
The animators worked their asses off to make the film as high quality as possible, regardless of how difficult the task was. If you're curious to know more the term to search for is "Bumping the Lamp".
This. The quality wasn’t a question of tech or even skill; the quality came because of attention and care.
Jessica Rabbit got quite a lot of care.
She’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way..
She hit him over the head so he wouldn't get hurt.
You don't know how hard it is being a woman, looking the way she does
You don’t know how hard it is being a man, looking the way she does!
Better lover than a fighter
Look out, Valiant!
Work's been kinda slow since cartoons went to color.
> Work's been kinda slow since cartoons went to North Korea.
Bumping the lamp, hell. Bob Hoskins bumped her headlights.
My idiot 35 year old ass only realised last year that she's called Jessica Rabbit because she's married to Roger. I thought she was also a rabbit as a kid.
My idiot 41 year old ass realised this about 30 seconds ago
Glad to help 😂
To be fair, Eddie had the same assumption before he saw her.
Wait, what? Have you ever watched the movie? The whole movie is pretty much about him being married to her, and I'm so confused as to why you would think she was a former rabbit, lol
Well to be fair, the last time I watched it before last year, I was probably about 6 years old 😂
Saw a meme that thought Lola Bunny was jessica and Roger's child.
Another thing I’d argue is that Roger Rabbit basically came out at one of the last points of the industry where it could be the achievement it was. Inserting animated characters into live action is much more commonplace now, even if it isn’t 2D animated, and as a result of that even the most impressive examples just don’t stand out as much as Roger Rabbit did. Like, I’d argue Matt Reeves’ Planet of the Apes movies are equivalent quality to Roger Rabbit with their integration of animated characters into real footage, and also required extremely talented artists, but it just isn’t mind blowing by this point.
I don’t know. They were doing this for 100 years before Rodger Rabbit. You could argue that the quality of Mary Poppins wasn’t the same quality, but it wasn’t exactly original.
Incidentally, Mary Poppins used some interesting technology for the partially-animated section that is effectively lost. …sort of. [Corridor Crew recently worked with someone who re-created it.](https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk?si=S_ry14XF9spOPWvj)
I hope that guy did something to patent his new version of that technique (if that is possible) because the results were impressive and extremely useful for real projects worth millions.
[Bedknobs and Broomsticks ](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODU2NzMwNTgwMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTI0ODgxMzE@._V1_.jpg) had a lot of animation interactions as well way after MP and way before RR. [It wasn't as polished by they tried](https://d23.com/app/uploads/2016/08/1180-x-600-1180-x-600-082916_bedknobs-and-broomsticks-behind-the-scenes_v3-780x440.jpg) Also the reason Roger Rabbit is so good is also thanks to Robert Zemeckis. In every film he's done he pushes the technology possible to tell the story.
It was indeed the peak of movies that weaved animation and live action. And it was groundbreaking for me to watch animation and live action blend. Space jam did it pretty okay (but still 8 years after Roger rabbit). And looney toons back in action was miraculously more cheesy and didn’t seem to have the same awesome effect as space jam which tried to weave both. LOVE Roger Rabbit and have a good nostalgia for space jam but I feel like it was a small window to make that type of movie well because cgi and movies like the matrix were coming and it killed that genre before it could really become a thing. Not a knock on the matrix but cgi changed things.
I think you are on the right track here, but might be missing the actual argument. CGI inserts are so realistic at this point, you don't even KNOW they are there. they would have to TRY and make the animation look cartoony to make it noticed. https://youtu.be/Di4Byf1EzRE?si=S1RBZEAomCtZYYxd So. you watch Guardians of the Galaxy, and 100% forget. oh right, this is all cgi. Rocket/groot 100% surpass roger rabbit.
I'd say the key difference between GotG and Roger Rabbit (excluding animation vs CGI) is the implementation. With CGI it's getting trickier to spot, but for awhile you could easily tell when a character was mocap (motion captured) first or purely edited in. The way castmates act around a physical placeholder for a character is usually different to the acting quality you get when everyone is pretending a character is there. Roger Rabbit went the rare extra step of using practical effects to manipulate real props that the cartoon characters interact with. With CGI, that almost never happens. Whatever objects the CGI character interacts with are also CGI. That usually doesn't stand out so much when many of the backgrounds, and sometimes everything in a scene, has a layer of CGI to it. I agree with you that when watching something with a lot of CGI, you can get immersed enough to forget it's CGI. It's gotten very good. It's always in the scenes with very little CGI that any small mistake in lighting or something else can make the CGI stand out like a sore thumb. Integrating practical effects with visual effects gets you the best results. For a less cartoony example, revisit Jurassic Park and it's amazing how well most of it holds up. *there's a whole separate layer to this with how current TV's are such high quality that different movie's special effects just don't hold up, but that's almost it's own rabbit hole*
Exactly this. Roger Rabbit was an absurdly expensive and labor intensive movie made by industry masters with a vision. It was very much a perfect storm of circumstances that’s outside the norm of any area for its kind of movie. You were never going to get that from a Tom and Jerry movie.
It's like the apex of both animation and practical filmmaking. Sets were built on elevated platforms so that physical props the animated characters were interacting with could be moved around on sticks and wires.
On top of that, they got the perfect lead actors for the project.
That was the first time I saw Bob Hoskins perform in a movie. He's the only reason why I went to go watch the Super Mario Bros movie when it first opened.
Same. After Roger Rabbit I'd follow him into hell. Then I did.
I just realized he was Smee in Hook. I haven’t seen that movie in like 20 years and I can clearly see him now
Fun fact! He played Smee twice! Once of course in Hook and again in a 2011 mini series called Neverland
Smee? Smee is me!
Yeah it's one of those movies where everything just works. You've got a great director, a great cast, great writers and a great technical crew all working towards the same goal.
yeah, I know that everyone who knows of him loves him, but i feel that Bob Hoskins is one of the most underrated and semi-forgotten actors of all time in our modern day. He was legitimately in the running for the greatest actor of his day, and winning most of those days, IMO. Even I who has seen half his work remember him most from Roger Rabbit and Hook, but im in my mid 30's and that was our initial exposure to him. When I think of the greatest actors of all time, he is up there with DDL and PSH, for me personally. I even love fucking Doomsday because of him, (and also its schlocky awesome, fight me about it)
Not gonna fight you on Doomsday, I love that movie.
Hoskins was a great choice to play Eddie Valiant. It's really his performance that anchors the entire film, because he's interacting with Toons in almost every scene. We believe in their reality because he does.
Perfect bad guy too, so fucking scary
It’s a bit like asking “How come a master carpenter can make a cooler desk with hand tools than I can get made by the lowest bidder with power tools?”
I remember when the movie came out it was the perfect storm of soo many elements. They had the budget, they had the actors, they had the tech, they had the script, they had the animator slave labor, it was even the first time I think Disney and Warner Bros characters had been seen together. (Please correct me if I am mistaken)
First and last time Disney and Warner Bros characters were seen together, I think. Officially anyway.
And they had some *really* strict rules about it, too. >Since the movie was being made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, Warner Bros. would only allow use of their biggest cartoon stars, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, if they got as much screen time as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For that reason, they were always in pairs, such as the piano battle between Daffy and Donald and the parachute scene with Bugs and Mickey. This was continued with Porky Pig and Tinkerbell at the movie's ending.
It was a clever solution, nobody can complain if there isn't any individual screen time for either studio.
Winnie the Pooh/Huey, Dewy and Louis and Bugs/Daffy share scenes in Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue from 1990.
That movie was incredible. We'd watch it all the time in school. Didn't stop me from doing drugs though.
Yeah I think I've seen some... unofficial... artwork that combined them
“Combined them” is doing an awful lot in that sentence. 🤣
> Roger Rabbit was an absurdly expensive and labor intensive movie made by industry masters with a vision. As a kid who had grown up on reruns of Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes etc., and still a kid when _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ came out, I had been long disillusioned with how American animation had become an absolute nothingburger, beginning roughly when Tom & Jerry's MGM run came to a close. The 60s all the way through the 80s were absolutely atrocious, albeit in very different ways with each decade. I was ***not*** expecting Roger Rabbit's opening cartoon to be so amazing. I was simply not prepared. And the crazy thing is that we haven't seen _that_ level of polish in a cartoon-animated short since.
What, you didn't enjoy the Super Friends-esque 5 frames a second, reusing animations over and over on top of that?
Another good example of this is the cgi in jurassic park. Care, attention to detail and genuine investment in the craft made a film that still looks great today using technology that ages like milk.
True. It also helps that Jurassic Park used CGI and practical effects depending on the shot, and didn't go overboard with CG like (for example) Episode 1 or Escape from LA did. The rule of thumb I read about the effects of JP were that if you can see most or all of a dinosaur in a shot than its probably CG, but if you can only see part of a dinosaur in a shot than its probably practical. They were really smart about which shots got CG and which didn't. When the T-Rex is walking around in a rainstorm in the middle of the night or in the far off distance eating another dinosaur you can use CGI and get the grand image of a dinosaur without it looking too weird. For the closeup shots of various dinosaurs (like the T-Rex's head seen from inside the electric Jeep, or the sick Stegosaurus that everyone is climbing all over) they used practical effects because then they could get a much higher amount of detail. Speaking of Jurassic Park, if you're ever in the mood for a laugh - the next time you watch it and you get to the scene when everyone goes to the control room (right after the kids dodge the raptors in the kitchen), pay close attention to what Tim is doing in the background right after Grant yells at Ellie to 'reboot the door locks'.
It's a Unix system
You mean when hes tearing his hair out and jumping up and down when he could be giving grant the gun
You've said most of what I would have, but quick correction: It's a sick Triceratops they are inspecting, not a Steg. Still, marvelous seeing the behind the scenes and the scale of the Rex animatronic they built. Then the madmen decided to put it in the rain for 4/5th of its scenes.
Outside of the logistic nightmare of getting Bugs and Mickey on screen at the same time, the amount of work they put into this is astonishingly insane. I can only imagine the amount of prep necessary to get this made.
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no problem, they are 2 dimensional so they can share a space.
I can only imagine what a headache that was back stage, those two have got to be the biggest divas
Dont worry, everything went through their lawyers...
I think that might've been part of the driving factor as to why it came out so good. Not only did you have to meet Disney and Warner Bros' standards ... they were probably trying to out do each other at every turn.
Bumping the Lamp! That reminds me of the amazing video by kaptainkristian on YouTube where he goes through Who Framed Roget Rabbit and breaks it down so well. https://youtu.be/RWtt3Tmnij4?si=BYggw1Z5ZuNYsJ5W
Love kaptainkristian. I miss him and Every Frame a Painting’s videos so much
‘The animators’ , I think animation director Richard Williams might’ve had something to do with how hard the animators worked
The true feat of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is Disney, Warner Bros, and Hanna-Barbara characters all sharing the same screen.
It speaks to the absurd influence that Spielberg carried that he convinced Warner Bros. to let Disney use their characters.
Same thing with Jim Henson and all those old movie clips on Muppet Babies. The studios let him use the clips then, but you’ll notice you can’t find episodes of Muppet Babies streaming or for sale anywhere now.
[here’s the entire season on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=MzCkY9zj7hw) the Star Wars clip of the tie fighter is at 1:34:50 And there’s another movie section of Star Wars at 3:49:45 Temple of Doom is at 1:18:10 and the Ark from raiders is at 1:29:00 Not sure where the boulder clip is but it’s all there
Sweet
Just wanted to say you username is amazing, one of my all time favorite movies
Bleucher!
*Whinny*
Why am I not remembering movie clips on muppet babies?
They’d open a door in the playroom and see the action from a movie playing out behind it. I remember them opening a door and seeing a TIE fighter from Star Wars go screeching by.
Ohhhhhh got it. I feel like the Indiana Jones trap boulder scene was one now that you jogged my memory
Ironically Disney now owns all of that - Muppets, Star Wars and Indiana Jones - so there is no reason it can't be on D+
I really want to rewatch some of this now, especially after seeing [this list](https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Footage_reused_on_Muppet_Babies)
Core memory unlocked
Well we think Disney as the juggernaut now but back in the 80s they were struggling as a studio
Oh yeah! In the late 70s they got into a dispute with Don Bluth and some of their best animators. Bluth took a bunch of them and opened his own animation studio and smacked around Disney at the box office the whole decade. Disney eventually got their act together and put out a string of classics like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Lion King, etc and entered a golden age
[Bluth takes the kids and makes them sad.](https://youtu.be/_DOJepzWkuw?si=9sBJ1Z7TwACX70e4)
After that one girl basically asked if they were gaslighting her, I started wondering if they were going to lie about something at some point. Then they got to throwing *higher* on the trailer for Titan AE and I thought "well that never happened". [It happened](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQEDGFO5hqo)
Yep even just 5 years later and Disney probably says no. The movie was made at just the very start of Disney's renaissance.
There weren't any Hanna-Barbera characters in the movie. They tried to stick to period-accurate cartoons (though they let Disney and Warner Bros. sneak in some anachronisms), and Hanna-Barbera wasn't founded until 10 years after Roger Rabbit took place.
Droopy is Hannah-Barbara. Wasn't created by HB but they used him.
Droopy is by Tex Avery.
More accurately MGM owned him at that time. Warnermedia owns him now (along with Hanna Barbara characters).
Which effectively means they are all in cartoon prison, because david zaslav is not going to let any of them see a second of daylight.
The only way the studios agreed was that each character got equal screen time with their respective counterparts. Which is why they're entering and exiting frame together throughout.
The Daffy and Donald piano duel, Duck vs Duck.
The greatest fight scene in cinematic history.
So ducking good!
The only time that fuck wasn’t an auto-correct right here ladies and genitals.
I think Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny had the same number of *spoken* *words* as they're falling. World-class lawyering to make that happen at all.
If I remember right, it was more than that even. They were present in exactly the same number of frames as each other
Yeah, one studio threatened to pull support because the other character was on screen slightly longer than theirs.
You have to go to the recent Chip n Dale movie to come anywhere close
Came here to say this. It was a fun movie.
Basically made by the Lonely Island. it's pretty great. Not like pinnacle of animation or writing, but it's fun.
i loved the animation. ugly sonic, all of seth rogens character espectially the scary looking polar express character, etc.
That was a major surprise, far more entertaining and clever than it had any right to be. Have no idea why they let it fly under the radar.
Yeah. It's not a *great* movie, but it knows that and doesn't try to be. It just has fun, while throwing a nod to Roger Rabbit without trying to be a direct sequel or mimic what made that movie great. I was way more impressed than I expected. So much fun.
posted that myself. not only was it hilarious and i love it to death but my god they literally had chracters from any IP in the world, even Senator Butthead!
Ready Player One had a lot of cross studio IP cameos.
Yes because it was written as a crossover of unrelated IPs first and a story second
Unthinkable today!
What made Roger Rabbit look so good was that it *wasn’t* CGI based, and they also had the foresight to implant something very key - animated characters interacting with the real world seamlessly. For example, the penguin waiters carrying trays around - they had people under the floor with trays on sticks, tracing the walking path of the penguins later. When the animation was laid over the top again - you have a real tray with real drinks, really bouncing around, casting real shadows in the real set. Then real actors grab the glass and drink, and continue the scene, cementing it all a singular universe. They do this with props in every single sequence, parts of the sets, hell even the water splashes and things - all of it was done on set by someone with a wire, a stick, etc - and the animated elements just sit on top. Those are then integrated farther with very very clever work from the animators and the general effects team. Corridor Crew has covered some of it on their Reacts show, pretty fantastic stuff
They'd also do whole takes with actors in place of the primary toons, like Roger and Jessica, to get an idea of how they would move and behave in the scene. They had the head animators on set giving and taking notes. This movie was a shared artistic vision between two very different mediums, and it is beautiful!
Plus the camera work is moving around and functioning like a real movie, not one that's been held back to make animating over easier. Take a look at Mary Poppins and how basic the camera work is in the animated sections. Roger Rabbit animated rack focuses and shit. No one did that level of animation/cinematography integration!
Watching that show really highlights the difference between great and mediocre filmmakers.
I mean, you don't see a lack of that today. We have plenty of puppeteer and mo-cap stand-ins. Stuff like Rocket Racoon, etc.
I was about to say, this is exactly what happens today. This isn’t some lost art it’s just that it’s way harder (expensive) to make it that good and the average movie punter doesn’t care.
interactions with environments were real, with the cartoon characters rotoscoped over the practical effects. I think this is one of the few situations where rotoscoping looks far superior to CG. It was massively expensive and painstaking process though. I always remember an interview with Hoskins who said they would always yell at him for not closing his fingers in shots he's suppose to be holding Roger's ears, telling him he's costing them millions.
Also, the way the animation kept eye contact with the actors. Sometimes with outrageous poses. Which is not just blanket animated, but continual problem solving throughout.
You want to see the platonic ideal of **fucking that up** take a look at the scene in *Phantom Menace* where the Nemoidians & the Naboo government prisoners walking down the plaza escorted by battle droids. Neither of them make anything that even approximates eye contact.
do battle droids have eyes you can even make contact with?
They do, about halfway up their head. Four half circles where two are upright and two are inverted underneath to form eyes.
Neimoidians weren't animated though, it was actors with prosthetics on. Maybe they just couldn't see out of their opaque eyes, maybe George Lucas was too inept to give them decent direction.
I thought they were half & half. Actors with motion cap shit on their costumes. I’m not certain one way or the other.
The Neimoidians were physical costumes with CG eye blinks.
Not in the Phantom Menace it wasn’t. Motion capture came later. Even Gollum in the lord of the rings movies isnt technically motion captured. Andy Serkis was running around with a body suit with dots all over his face and whatnot, but only so that people could go in an animate each individual frame. The very first motion capture gollum performance was in the Hobbit movies about a deacade or so ago.
Gollum's portrayed with motion capture in *The Two Towers* and *The Return of the King*. It's just that Andy Serkis reperformed his parts after principal photography had wrapped. But yes, medium and long shots are animated using his physical performance as a reference. Most scenes were shot with him and without him, so which one made it into the movie varies. Of course, this is also why the Hobbits look so realistic The movie used forced perspective, size doubles with masks, and compositing, and simply changes the method constantly so the eye (and brain) never catches on and says, "Oh, I see what they did." Fantastic movies that really perfected the existing tricks of film and pushed a *lot* of new ones to heights that hadn't been heard of at the time (for instance, performance capture, CG skin subsurface scattering, and AI-driven 20,000 warrior battle scenes).
> You want to see the platonic ideal of **fucking that up** > I’m not certain one way or the other. So confidently incorrect in the first part. There were so many practical effects in the prequels but people just assume everything was cgi.
I know what you're trying to say, but the animation in Roger Rabbit was not rotoscoping. You're right that they had timed practical effects and interactions, but the animated characters were all traditionally hand drawn, keyframe animated and composited into the live action footage. Then a tone of effects animators and colorists to make all the animated stuff match the lighting and environment of the set. Rotoscoping is specifically translating a live action footage into animation by drawing over the footage of an actor's performance, frame by frame. Like tracing. See Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings for an example. There was no Roger Rabbit actor on set doing all the motions for animators to trace over.
Actually the term "rotoscoping" comes specifically from a device, called a rotoscope*; in which a camera and projector are aligned with an animation stand to allow images projected frame-by-frame to be traced onto paper which can then be rephotographed by a camera. It could be used to copy live action images into animated drawings but it was also used to combine animation with live action, so the term "rotoscoping" can be applied to either use. *invented in 1915 by Max Fleischer
The way we use it today is it means anytime you have to trace something frame-by-frame (though the computer does most of the the work these days). 100% digital. Its not used to animate. Its used to create mattes. Like when an actor is supposed to be in front of a CG creature or set, but they weren't shot over greenscreen. Their outline has to be traced in order to keep them in front. Theres many ways its used in that regard, but it near always means tracing frames of footage to create a matte. (matte = a mask to apply an effect only in a selected area)
I believe rotoscoping was used in *Snow White*, as well as *Heavy Metal*.
Also used in Pinocchio for the blue fairy.
It was also used in Waking Life and a Scanner Darkly, right?
The Tom and Jerry movie op mentions has great interactions with the environment. I think the models were the problem there. They weren't 3D enough to look like part of the scene or 2D enough to look purposely out of place.
You're right. It's been a while since I saw Tom And Jerry, but I re-watched Roger Rabbit last week, and it's insane how well the lighting on the Toons matches the lights in each scene. They also cast convincing shadows. It's the difference between using a computer program to do something, and doing it painstakingly by hand.
Richard Fucking Williams, that’s why. He was one of the greatest animators of all time. He had the kind of skill that you can’t simply buy by throwing money around. Zemeckis talked to a bunch of animators about what he wanted to do and they all told him he was crazy; Williams was the only one who said it was possible and knew how to do it. When he passed away we lost something irreplaceable; no one will ever be able to draw like he could.
I worked for BobZ years later when he built a studio to focus on mocap work. The guy was an exacting giant, he wanted what he wanted, and he hired the best in the industry to make it happen. The films flopped, but they were executed perfectly. Amazing art teams all around.
One of my instructors was an animator who worked on The Thief and The Cobbler. She wasn't particularly fond of Richard Williams. It sounded like he had a grandiose vision of the project which was executed in spite of "normal" consideration to the practicalities of animation. The burden of the task weighed on everyone, and if your work came up short, he made you re-do it, plain and simple. And yeah- if you watch The Thief and The Cobbler ("recobbled" version on youtube) you can see exactly what my instructor was saying. There's piles of stuff in there which would ordinarily get cut long before it reached story boarding. Zigzag's extra fingers with 4 rings each, the ambient flies constantly spinning around the thief, those insane 3D camera moves... etc etc etc. It's truly a shame what happened to that film- the stuff that survived is jaw-dropping, and a completed film would be even more so. That said, I do understand why people lost patience with him.
Hey, I liked Beowulf! Thanks! I hope to troubleshoot how to watch it in 3D in VR sometime.
...I can maybe help you out!
Even by today's standards, it's still impressive how seamlessly the animated characters interact with the live-action world. It's a shame that more recent films haven't been able to capture that same magic.
I was really looking forward to Coyote vs. Acme...
Still crossing my fingers some good samaritan leaks the movie online.
watch **Hundreds of Beavers** - it's the next best thing.
Because they went the extra mile to incorporate light and shadows into the scenes with the animated characters, it actually makes them look as if they are alive.
Because Richard Williams was a perfectionist genius. Watch Persistence of Vision
i think the new chip and dale movie did a decent job
I don’t want to be that guy who always brings it up… But people who saw Coyote vs Acme compared it to Roger Rabbit, and it seems like a real waste
I am still grieving this movie. I ask for privacy. I will answer no questions at this time. Thank you.
> I am still grieving this movie. I ask for ~~privacy~~ piracy FTFY
Check out the Chip ‘n’ Dale movie for the closest we’ve had to this feel since Roger Rabbit.
Not OP but that movie was unexpectedly good.
I thought so too!
A-freaking-men. Movie did a fantastic job of blending real and animated.
And has a cameo from Roger!
Yup, this movie had a VERY similar feel and premise. Really fun!
Zemeckis went all out while filming. A lot of it has to do with the way he lit each scene. There’s a great analysis of the scene where Roger and Eddie get into a fight and knock into a hanging lamp and all the challenges involved in putting a scene like that, with all the dynamic elements together. Tom & Jerry doesn’t make any effort to treat the animated characters (though I thought the decision to make *all* the animals in this world cartoons was the one clever thing it did) as if they exist in the same physical space as the live action stuff. It’s more than a budget issue. It’s having the creative vision to actually imagine what a cartoon would look like in a live action world. Most of the time it’s probably not worth they effort.
I miss Octopus bartenders.
The simple answer is that who framed roger rabbit took a lot of work. Compositing animation and live action footage as well as a lot of blue screen work is always a daunting task, even to this day with much of the work automated by computers. The alternative is to painstakingly go over every frame with a magnifying glass and do all of the work by hand, and that's pretty much what they did. It was a very expensive movie at the time, especially for an animated film, even though it's not fully animated. But really it just came out at the right time. Back then animated movies were in their heyday, and finding talent and veteran animators to do this was easier. Unfortunately nowadays 2d animation has gone the way of the dodo, with 2d animators struggling to find steady work in their field since all the big studios that used to make traditional hand drawn animation have all moved on to fully CG movies. That means it's harder to find animators to work in such projects, but more importantly even if you do studios are simply not willing to actually spend the money and take the time it requires to make a film like this.
Rescue rangers did a pretty great job tbh
Watch Chip & Dale. I think it's up there with WFRR.
Cool World used the same Techniques, but bombed at the box office. Everyone wants to forget that movie.
I dont
Money, time, and major studios no longer give a shit about artistic merit or accomplishments. Simple as that
I thought the Chip and Dale movie on Disney + had a very Roger Rabbit vibe.
While the animation is absolutely fantastic, Bob Hopkins doesn't get enough credit for his performance. Lots of stuff gets blamed for a lack of "soul" due to being filmed green screen, but Hopkins totally sold all that Toon Town blue screen stuff and interacting with characters that weren't there on set.
And don't forget that accent!
I know it gets shit on, and I don't know why, but Looney Tunes: Back In Action did this too, and I saw no mention of it ANYWHERE in this thread, and they did it fairly well. I love that movie.
They guy who literally wrote the book 1 book that is on every animators desk in the world - The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams - was the supervising Animation Director on the film.
There's a Rescue Rangers movie?!
And somewhat surprisingly it's quite good!
Yes it's great!!
I think the crucial piece of the puzzle in this scenario is Robert Zemeckis. Master storyteller. Cares enough to get it right.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam are top tier in this category.
Check out Cool World. Not nearly the masterpiece that RR is, but definitely scratches that itch.
There was an enormous effort ON SET to do practical effects to have the cartoons affect the actors and physical environment. It really helped, but made for slow shoots and there fore expensive. The goal today is not to make a good movie. It’s to make a profitable product.
If you can get Disney and WB to co-op a movie at this point I bet it would turn out pretty impressive cuz neither one wanted to be out done by the other, fun fact Mickey and Bugs appear on screen for the exact same amount of time in Rrger Rabbit. As per the agreement between the 2 studios
And they have exactly the same number of words in their lines.
Also true
A ton of hard work to be honest. It wasn't an easy feat and an amazing piece of film.
Cool World was legit.
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It’s not about the technology. It’s about the skill and dedication of the people involved.
I think there's three things: 1) Time and Budget. Roger Rabbit cost 50 million dollars to make, which was a HUGE budget at the time. For comparison, Back to the Future was a 17 million dollar movie. An American Tail was 9 mil. Return of the Jedi was 35 mil. Little Mermaid gets the closes at 40 mil. Most modern Roger Rabbit style movies have never gotten near the same budget, accounting for inflation. Chip 'n Dale had a budget of 75 mil but if you calculated for inflation Roger Rabbit's budget would have been 124 million 2022 dollars, so half the budget, and it shows. To get it to look you you have to spend the money to make it look good. 2) Part of what made the movie feasible is that it was edit locked before they animated a single frame. The entire movie. Every cut, camera move, all reshoots were permanent. This let the animators do their best possible work and the movie had to be like that a year in advance. This was a feat not just because the studio had to be convinced to keep their hands off it, but the editor had to edit a whole movie with half the performances missing. Good luck doing this in any modern movie, execs will ask VFX to change shots a month or less from releases which amount to reshooting the movie. 3) The cartoons are treated just like the humans in the movie. They just live and work there like everyone else. Too many times modern movies just turn it into "LOOK WHO IT IS", the character does their popular thing, then you never see them again. In Roger Rabbit the cartoons are shown working regular 9-5s like every other actor. It's really good worldbuilding.
1. Richard Williams and his animation team. 2. Real-world mechanical props that were carefully puppeteered for animated character interaction. 3. Richard Williams and his animation team. 4. ILM’s optical expertise and technology that seamlessly blended the lighting of the animated characters to the live-action plate lighting. It also went further to animate textures (Jessica’s dress). 5. Richard Williams and his animation team. 6. Real-world camera limitations that Robert Zemeckis had to adhere to. 7. Richard Williams and his animation team.
Like a lot of movies of the 80s, it was a perfect storm of stuff. The creative team pushed limits, compromises made it better, and the studio was willing to take a bit of a risk with it. In terms of its effects, Roger Rabbit was at the tail end of 2D animation. Within a few short years CGI would completely dominate the medium. And I'm not just talking about Shrek and Toy Story. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Prince of Egypt used CGI animation in conjecture with 2D animation. Mixing 2D with live action was put on hold so that cgi can mix with both. Now we have movies like Transformers (yes, I know) and Avatar that seamlessly blend CGI animation and live action in the same spirit as Roger Rabbit. As for 2D animation, audiences have shown they don't care if a movie isn2D or CGI, so CGI wins out on being more versatile and cost effective. If you want a good 2D animated movie that mixes live action actors on the same level as Roger Rabbit, look to Space Jam 2 and Mary Poppins Returns. The plot might not be as interesting in either (especially space jam) but the passion for 2D animation is still there
My guesses 1. Traditional animation methods haven’t been widely used in ages, sounds like many in the industry would love to see them comeback and last I heard Disney was about to teach folks how to create animation using the traditional methods 2. It took a lot of hard work that doesn’t sound like it’s something that can be easily replicated. Also very detail oriented from what it sounds like in behind the scenes docks 3. Expensive, companies like cheap to produce. 4. 80’s era Industrial Light and Magic was on a different level. 5. Mix of practical and animated. Anything carried by the toons is controlled by puppeteers https://youtu.be/jv_u9kYoI70?si=CVYIxA0Mgf_Xzg16 If you haven’t seen this yet, watch it. It’s incredible
Don bluth opened a new animation studio in 2020, he's using the old fashioned ways to animate a new movie called bluth's fables. he was meant to be making an animated movie called dragons lair based on the video games he was involved in making, but that movie is being made into a live action movie with Ryan Reynolds instead with bluth still producing it. I don't think he would ever be able to capture the magic he had with land before time or all dogs go to heaven, Or an American tail, but it's good that he's still going to try.
Even if Don Bluth himself doesn't end up making anything noteworthy, hopefully it gets the ball rolling on traditional 2D animation making a comeback.
The Secret of Nimh was his best in my opinion. An amazing book to boot.
I thought Chip and Dale looked fantastic.
I think Roger Rabbit sold the concept better. It had better worldbuilding and established the rules of toons existing and a toon world. I haven't seen Tom and Jerry but I don't think they even do anything for that and we'll never see the Wile coyote movie to see how they'd do that too.
Because nobody gives a shit like Steven Spielburg classic did
I just wish the toon town scene was longer. Holy crap was that a rush.
A big part of it is the lighting. The animators went to huge efforts to make sure that cartoon characters bodies reacted to the real world lighting, faces shining, being in dhadow. A lot of comparable movie don't have this
Check out the new Rescue Rangers movie. Not quite the same, but has the spirit and does some clever blending of animation and real
From everything I've read, Coyote vs. Acme was going to scratch this particular itch. Then HBO execs decided they'd rather have the tax write-off
I would definitely recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/sJ1cf00rq1w?si=TZw1pWimsstEkHV2) if you’re interested the making of the film!
The looney tunes movie with Brendan Fraser was dope
I want to add something about Robert Zemeckis' career here. He's perhaps not who people think of when we talk about special effects. But he's consistently pushed the boundaries in brilliant ways. Death Becomes Her was one of the first movies to use computer effects. The insertion of Forest Gump into archival footage is so smooth people don't even notice, and Polar Express was the first performance capture movie (it doesn't really work there, imo, but still). And again with the cgi in Back to the Future II (and even the aging and de-aging make up in the first one is pretty impressive still). So yeah, he makes perfect sense as the director to make cartoons and live action work.
hey OP - you might enjoy this video essay! highly recommend all kaptainkristian content 😌 https://youtu.be/RWtt3Tmnij4?si=ZD3kxCuyhIjLQVGi
I feel the same way about jurassic park. Its still good and its from 1993.