The non-traditional success of Zemeckis’s film for the Mouse House triggered the resurgence of their markedly more traditional animation: the next year, the delightful but conventionally fairytale-based The Little Mermaid was released and a renaissance was declared. Roger Rabbit & Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom. (We’ll leave Elastigirl out of it for the moment.) Yet where Zemeckis’s film felt subversive in both its black-comic doublespeak and formal invention, this kind of layering now feels calculated and committee-tweaked in studio family fare: Pixar’s latest, written with a customary story supervisor and two “story managers” in attendance, is both slickly tooled and surprise-free. You can feel the two-pronged impact of its winking, multi-levelled comedy in virtually every animated juggernaut of the modern era, from the low-hanging dirty punnery of the Shrek films to the plain LGBT subtext of Frozen to any amount of zippy in-jokes in, well, The Incredibles 2. The word “game-changer” is wildly overused in Hollywood, but if it feels applicable to Roger Rabbit, that’s because it’s built entirely on puckish game-playing to adults and children alike. It may be the quintessential four-quadrant blockbuster: Jessica Rabbit’s sex appeal is just one dog-whistle component targeted to tease some members of the family while passing blandly through others. (Those visual effects won Zemeckis’s film one of its four Oscars.) Were the film released today, its technology might not cause as many jaws to drop, but its storytelling still might: at a time when family-friendly studio entertainments are workshopped, focus-grouped and groupthought to within an inch of their airless lives, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? still stands out as bracingly, remarkably strange for a multimillion-dollar product released under Disney’s auspices through their Touchstone Pictures division.ĭrawn from a distinctly grown-up novel, Gary K Wolf’s nutso satirical noir Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, it worked intricate narrative properties from adult genres into the innocent realm of Saturday morning cartoons with dazzling fluency, balancing fast, charred verbal comedy with gloriously elemental slapstick. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was, in 1988, an imposingly high-concept confection by Hollywood standards: the driving gimmick of its limber script, that humans and ghettoised cartoon characters could live and interact in the same dimension, was fluidly realised with techniques light years ahead of Mary Poppins’ live-action/animation blending 24 years previously. A character of wittily adult conception and appeal, the 2D glamazon nonetheless slotted slinkily into the more antic, kid-friendly hijinks of Robert Zemeckis’s form-bending multimedia comedy, which pitted Bob Hoskins’ dishevelled 1940s Hollywood gumshoe against a manic ensemble of invented cartoon characters and Looney Tunes veterans to solve a snaky showbiz murder mystery. Smokily voiced by Kathleen Turner (with Amy Irving taking over for the sultry torch songs) and drawn like an anatomically impossible hybrid of Veronica Lake and Rita Hayworth, Jessica Rabbit swiftly overtook Betty Boop as the ne plus ultra of animated sex symbols, and she wasn’t even the main attraction. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Animated form notwithstanding, she kind of is, and Lane is far from the first person to note that: brace yourself before typing the words “Elastigirl porn” into Google, is what I’m saying.īob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant and Kathleen Turner voicing Jessica Rabbit. What inspired less debate, however, was the question of whether Elastigirl – sleek in spike-heeled thigh boots and a rubber bodysuit, and seemingly made curvier than in the 2004 original – was hot. Some found Lane’s exaggerated leering over a family comedy lewdly funny, others simply gross. Or not so innocent, depending on who you believe: Lane poked fun at what he claimed was Pixar’s overt sexualisation of cartoon superhero mom Elastigirl, likening her to Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades franchise before joking that she’d prompt many an accompanying dad to “ his cooling soda firmly in his lap” at the cinema. At a time when the predominant male gaze in the world of film criticism is being questioned by Oscar-winning female actors and lowly denizens of Twitter alike, the erudite New Yorker critic Anthony Lane took more flak than he might have expected for an irreverent review of Pixar’s innocent animated romp The Incredibles 2.
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