Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Toontown is an unruly culmination of every comically violent, physics-defying stunt the cartoons of our childhoods delivered with unapologetic abandon. Eddie has good reason to despise it and its residents, and many a viewer will too. Roger and his animated cohorts aren't a lovable bunch – most of them aren't even that likable – but that's the point. On-screen, toon madness is hilarious. Off-screen, it's id run rampant, and it takes a lot for Eddie and, by extension, his real-world ilk to warm up to such loony lunacy. Eddie comes around, of course. You may not. If you get the joke, though, and more importantly enjoy the joke, the film's sharp satire, endless one-liners, and countless references and cameos will be a real treat. Roger is annoying but that's precisely the point. The toons are insufferable but, again, that's the point. The magic lies in the manner in which the toons are deployed, or rather hurled, into Eddie's path. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is Zemeckis' love of classic cartoons and the full fury of his imagination unleashed, and the lengths to which he and writers Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman go to create a viable world where toons and humans co-exist is refreshing. For all its unwieldiness, there's an almost airtight logic to the wholly illogical realm of Toontown and nine-tenths of the fun is in watching Zemeckis and his cohorts play in the sprawling sandbox built by Warner Bros., Disney, Universal Pictures, MGM, Paramount Pictures and the likes of Mel Blanc, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Max Fleischer, Walt Disney and the Nine Old Men.

But Zemeckis' passions extend beyond the bounds of Toontown. Hard-boiled film noir, tough-talking detective stories, the history of Tinseltown, the early studio system… nothing, and yet everything, is sacred. Moreover, studying the roots of Zemeckis' career-long experiment in blurring the line between animation and reality adds another layer to the experience – especially all these years later – and another reason to fall in love with everything the director managed to pull off at the very beginning. By the same token, if the film falters, it's in its exuberance. Though probably a strange comparison, Roger Rabbit often reminds me of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in that Zemeckis so commits to his premise that the results become a stylized assault of theme-driven imagery, language, and atmosphere. It works as far as I'm concerned but at the expense of emerging as an across-the-board crowd pleaser. All told, Who Framed Roger Rabbit remains a divisive classic; one that will strike some as brilliant, others as mildly amusing, and still others as tiring or downright unbearable. Thankfully, Hoskins, Lloyd, Turner and, yep, even Fleischer at his most unhinged help make Valiant's Inferno a terrific performed, sharply penned, a laugh-out-loud love letter to Old Hollywood and the Golden Age of Animation.