On a normal day in 1986, Walt executives Disney Studio huddled in a screening room to see what $100,000 had bought.
That’s what they paid for a proof-of-concept screen test for an upcoming movie. If they liked what they saw, the project could move forward. If they didn’t, the film would likely be axed.
What they saw left them perplexed. A confused executive asked producer Don Hahn “What is this? Is it a guy in a bunny costume?
It was not. But that was exactly the reaction Hahn and his team were looking for — because the test combined an animated character with live-action elements so convincingly that it fooled Disney executives. They didn’t even realize they were looking at an animation. They thought it was a guy in a costume.
The 42-second clip – starring a young Joe Pantoliano as the live-action detective – was an audition for a film based on a book about a comic book hero who is murdered. The book was titled Who censored Roger Rabbit? The film would end up being called Who framed Roger Rabbit.
No wonder the audience in that screening room was surprised. Today, the test yet looks fantastic; an utterly persuasive illusion of a world where man and cartoons coexist. Some films have mixed live action and animation before Rogério Coelhoincluding Disney’s own Mary Poppins, where Dick Van Dyke waddled with a flock of animated penguins. No one has ever done this to such perfect effect or so consistently throughout the entire film. Unlike the test, Who Framed Roger Rabbit made Roger and several other “toons” central to the entire story, a film noir parody set in a world where cartoons live side by side with humans.
When Who Framed Roger Rabbit premiered in theaters several years later, viewers around the world shared a similarly shocked reaction. Who Framed Roger Rabbit became the highest-grossing film of the 1988 summer season. To compare its success: it earned almost exactly as much as the original Hard to kill It is Beetle juice I did it in theaters Combined. (Eventual winner of Best Film in 1988 rain man it was the only film to gross more in theaters that year.)
Rogério Coelho helped turn around Disney’s fortunes after a decade of box office failures. The following fall, Disney had another big animated hit with The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast followed two years later; earned almost as much as Rogério Coelho. Aladdin debuted in the fall of 1992 and surpassed them all. By this time, the so-called “Disney Renaissance” was in full swing.
Historians widely credit Rogério Coelho for sparking that Renaissance and for helping to generate new interest in classic Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons. who appeared in cameos in the film. The film has also inspired some stylistically similar (but creatively underwhelming) imitators in the live-action/animation hybrid space, including Cool world It is Space Jam. But seen today, Who Framed Roger Rabbit seems much more important than that. Even if you exclude his enormous impact on the animation medium, Rogério Coelho may still be the most influential Hollywood blockbuster of the 1980s.
It is true that films that bear direct visual similarities to Rogério Coelho disappeared quickly. But the formal techniques that underpin these similarities – the insertion of realistic animated characters into live-action worlds – have become the basis for countless blockbusters since 1988. I see shades of Roger Rabbit and his seamless integration into physical space – not to mention the pathos that makes him seem like a person of flesh and blood – in characters ranging from Lord of the Rings‘ Gollum to torment PotterDobby for the title characters in King Kong, Paddington, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sonic the HedgehogIt is Detective Pikachu.
It’s hard to imagine what Marvel movies would be like in a world without Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which provided a model of what a world inhabited by ordinary humans and supernatural beings would look like on screen. They explored this template in film after film, as they gave us a spiteful and soulful space raccoon and an invulnerable alien god with purple skin and a thirst for ultimate power, and dozens of Avengers, Guardians and Eternals in between.
AND Rogério Coelho has more in common with Marvel. At the end of the 1980s, the director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman imagined a world shared by all of Warner Bros.’ most famous cartoons in history. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop. (Original by author Gary K. Wolf Who censored Roger Rabbit? The novel included similar cameos from real-life comic book heroes such as Beetle Bailey and Dick Tracy.)
Although these cartoon characters had never met each other in any context before, they all lived together in Rogério Coelho‘Toontown’, essentially a fantastic neighborhood in Los Angeles populated by all these animated icons. This concept helped create the notion of a shared cinematic universe that would become so popular in Marvel films decades later.
Like so many modern Marvel films and others, Rogério Coelho it’s also peppered with Easter eggs for the most dedicated fans. You don’t need to know, for example, that the line of cows waiting outside the “Cattle Call” audition at Maroon Studios includes Disney’s Clarabelle. The sight of a bunch of excited cows waiting for a “Cattle Call” is already funny. If you to do If you know this is Clarabelle, however, it’s also likely that she essentially disappeared from Disney cartoons in the early 1940s – meaning that in a world where the cartoons are real, she he would be looking for work in 1947, when Rogério Coelho takes place.
This kind of attention to detail has become the coin of the realm in modern Hollywood. It was almost unheard of at the time – and certainly not part of the cartoons that Rogério Coelho is paying tribute. The way Rogério Coelho applying world-building logic to classic cartoons is very similar to the way Marvel adapted and modernized its own superheroes for the big screen. (Rogério CoelhoThe use of weaponized nostalgia to appeal to older audiences in what is ostensibly a children’s film is also reminiscent of Marvel’s business model.)
Ironically, the main way Rogério Coelho What’s not like modern films is the fact that despite its outsized influence on other timeless franchises, it never became one. Disney, Zemeckis and producer Steven Spielberg experimented for years to continue Rogério Coelho – At one point the plan called for a prequel set during World War II, at another the film would have revealed how Roger and Jessica met. Another project conceived after the death of star Bob Hoskins would have involved the ghost of his character, Eddie Valiant. Frankly, I’m relieved the last one was never made – even though it looks a lot like the 2021 one Ghostbuster legacyquel Ghostbusters: Afterlife to make you wonder if even the unmade sequels Rogério Coelho influenced Hollywood.
A sequel – as long as it didn’t involve the spectral likeness of a beloved dead actor – might have been good. It may also have been redundant. Nowadays, so many films seem Who framed Roger Rabbit.
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Gallery credit: Emma Stefansky