Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

Runtime: 104 minutes

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer, Stubby Kaye

From: Touchstone Pictures

I could have sworn I had watched and reviewed this here before; I did a search and saw I was mistaken, so here we go:

As I am sure many 7 year olds did in the summer of 1988, I went and saw this movie on the big screen; in this case it was with my mom and two sisters. I enjoyed it at the time, but it wasn't until later in life that I fully appreciated the movie. After all, it should come as no surprise that as a 7 year old, I had never seen a film noir, let alone something like Chinatown. As an adult I can now acknowledge such things and how clever this movie is.

I imagine most are familiar with the plot of how it's 1947 Hollywood and the universe is where humans exist alongside the cartoon world, and the story is totally noir with hardboiled down on his luck detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) taking what he thinks is an easy job where he has to take some pictures for a studio head turns out to be much more, a conspiracy involving an evil judge and a sexpot woman is unwittingly involved... and what an interesting character Jessica is: many are overcome with desire by merely looking at her and yet among all the men she could marry, she chose one who made her laugh.

The film is great in how it works both for kids and adults. I appreciate the adult story involving such serious drama as Valiant being haunted by his brother's death along with the things that would be appealing to younger folk, such as all the humor and finding it easy to believe that this world exists and you never doubt the idea of humanity co-inhabiting with the cartoon world. I've heard about all the effort it took to make fantasy a reality; as it's not a CGI creation that makes it a hell of a lot more impressive.

As a kid I watched plenty of old cartoons so of course I loved seeing the plentiful amount of different classic characters from a wide variety of different studios and I'll admit, it's still awesome seeing Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse (or Donald and Daffy Duck) interact with each other. By the way, the old urban legend of Donald calling Daffy an awful racial slur... it's bollocks.

I am thankful that as an adult I can rate this movie so highly and enjoy its unique story and also believe every second of it, and note that when he did it (even in some terrible movies I saw a long time ago) Christopher Lloyd could play an unforgettable villain. If you haven't seen this in ages or even if ::gasp:: you have never watched this at all, I say this is a problem you need to rectify.