Starting the Discussion

Back to the Theaters--with a Difference: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Klein, pp. 200-205

1. Most of Klein's chapter focuses on the ways in which Roger Rabbit uses both US history and cartoon history to construct a nostalgic experience for its viewers. In what sense was "something vital at stake in 1947--a matter of life and death"?
2. What's the metaphoric significance of dip, both in terms of post-war America and in terms of the cartoon industry?
3. What contrasts is Klein able to find between history according to the movie and history according to the historians in the immediate post-war period in Los Angeles (and other major US cities)?
4. "No commercial film I know records as clearly the way cartoons died (and why they remain important as part of our collective cultural memory)," Klein concludes. Have cartoons really died--and why might they remain important in cultural memory?
5. As you watch the film, try to jot down a couple of instances in which the animators are evoking episodes and motifs from classic cartoons/
6. Klein sees the animation in Roger Rabbit as more modern than classic in style. Based on your viewing, is he right?
7. The basic shape of the movie is determined not only by the references to 30s and 40s animation, but also by the characteristic lighting and style of the live action film noir movies made during the 40s and early 50s. What impact does it have to juxtapose the anarchic world of the Toons with the dark vision of the world embodied by Eddy Valiant?
8. Critics of the film have split over the effectiveness of the toon/coon parallel so clearly indicated in the film's references to Toons as a race apart, living in a technicolor ghetto. Was there a cultural critique here or is this element just a scattershot approach to meaning in the film?
9. This movie was shot in approximately a year, but it then took a staff of 320 animators another year (and over two million drawings) to achieve the depth, solidity and realistic interaction between cartoon and live actors we see in the completed film. Over one thousand composited shots were needed. Some people find the technical mastery simply dazzling; others see it as a technological achievement without a heart. What do you think?
10. One recurring theme in the film is the importance of laughter. How does that play out?
11. How does the pun on "framed" in the title work for you?
12. According to the director, Robert Zemeckis, Roger has "a Disney body, a Warner's head, and a Tex Avery attitude." Explain.
13. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a 1988 review of the film, observes, "What this movie shares with the other Spielberg/Lucas blockbusters of the Reagan era, for better and for worse, is an inability to view history as anything other than a reflection of film history (rather than the other way around)--which is as succinct an expression of the Reagan legacy as I can think of." You've seen a lot of Spielberg and Lucas films, I'm sure. Is this a fair criticism?
14. Writing in the early 1960s, animator Peter Burness commented, "In the American cartoon, death, human defeat, is never presented without being followed by resurrection, transfiguration. A cartoon character can very well be crushed and turned into a plate by a steam roller . . . but he arises immediately, intact, and full of life in the next shot. So it seems evident to me that the American cartoon, rather than glorifying death, is a permanent illustration of the theme of rebirth." This statement seems to me to sum up very well the contradictions in the classic animation produced in the US for theatrical release. As we look back not just at Roger Rabbit, but also at the cartoons it memoralizes, I'd like you to reflect on Burness's observation.

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