Sunday, April 10, 2011
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Satisfying little flick. Whenever I felt like it was going overboard on cartoon slapstick (never my favorite type of humor) it suddenly played up some more of the subtler noir parody. It stayed firmly in its time period and had some fantastic acting in it. (Christopher Lloyd was at first hilarious as Judge Doom and then FREAKING TERRIFYING near the end. I'm pretty sure that would have traumatized me as a child.) Seldom laughed out loud or anything, but I enjoyed the ride. Nicely done. 3.5 stars.
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I was nine when this came out. It's one of the few times I can say I really felt misled about a movie, because the ads I saw really played up the co-mingling of the Disney and Warner characters. As the movie progressed, however, it became obvious they were peripheral at most. I admit, I felt disappointed for most of the movie because I felt they'd pulled a bait and switch on me.
But then came Jessica Rabbit into the film and my world was never quite the same. She represented a kind of maturity and sophistication to animated storytelling the likes of which I had not encountered. Sure, there'd been attractive women in cartoons before, but they were almost always played for laughs in one way or another. Not Jessica.
Even then, I knew she represented the real deal about sexuality. She wasn't merely there to provoke the male characters into doing something we could laugh at; she was there to really affect us in the audience.
It wasn't quite the full epiphany of seeing Doctor Zhivago for the first time in middle school, but it was still a key moment for me.
Oh, and yes: Judge Doom makes me uncomfortable even today.
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