The Talkies/Rabbit, Run

...thus watching Saturday morning network fare nowadays is, in more than one way, a grim experience...

...The film is, in fact, a co-production of Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and Touchstone Films, adivision of Disney...

...buildings don't...

...Words like simoleon and zillion proliferated...

...These same physical laws apply for the cartoon characters in Roger...

...It is, in short, an exhilarating, magical experience...

...Though I'd hardly jump at the opportunity to defend those endowments (whose work often amounts to little more than government-subsidized literary or academic log-rolling), it can at least be said that they don't presume to accord preferential legal status to certain artists and art works...

...and you get more and more tickled with Roger himself (splendidly dubbed by Charles Fleischer), a cartoon character as memorable, lovable, and hilarious as any you can name...

...Buildings play a civic role that films and novels don't, and landmarking is simply one of many ways—along with zoning laws, building codes, and safety regulations—in which government exercises its regulatory rights over them...

...As if that weren't bad enough, the high price of animation has, in addition, drastically reduced the technical quality of most cartoons...

...Not only is it wonderful, it reminds you what the word wonderful really means: it excites wonder, astonishes you, causes you to marvel...

...it's the part of the world he knows and understands best...

...they wrote and drew things that made them laugh, simple as that...

...An exception...

...But an advisory board most certainly isn't the answer...

...But this analogy doesn't work...

...I know that my own favorite cartoons, in my childhood, were those in which an occasional joke routinely went over my head...

...and an army of animators (Roger's credits seem to last almost as long as the picture itself) succeed in integrating the human and toon physical laws, as well as the distinct human and toon ways of viewing the world, with remarkable wit, coherence, and imagination...

...Only a moment passes before you buy the gimmick completely, and at no point in the film—not even when the hero, human private-eye Eddie Valiant (Hoskins), pays a visit to Toontown (a sequence that might easily have gone a bit too far and destroyed the illusion completely)—does your belief in it all falter...

...the third time to look closely at all that technical stuff and drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how the hell they did it (and laugh at the jokes...

...Ye gods...

...What makes Roger different from the golden-age cartoons is that, in the world imagined by this film, the cartoon characters live in the same dimension as the rest of us...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988...

...Though I didn't fully grasp them, I was entertained by these cartoons...

...Perhaps something should be done to prevent it...

...E"Tilm notes : Some thoughts on col-/ orization and the law...

...If the creators of one film have the right to be accorded disclaimers in cases of colorization, then the creators of all films have that right...

...and what a flawless piece of work this most technically challenging and directorially problematic one has turned out to be...

...On June 30, a New York Times story by Andrew L. Yarrow reported that the House of Representatives had voted to establish something called the National Film Preservation Advisory Board, which would be empowered to "select up to 25 films a year that represent 'an enduring part of our nation's historical and cultural heritage.' " Those films selected "would be included in a National Film Registry and given a commission seal that could be used for promotion...

...the Disney Studios, and Walt himself, are both name-dropped in the script...

...They're not mere drawings but actual beings known as "toons" who live in a Los Angeles community called Toontown, and earn a living by acting in cartoons that have been written, directed, and produced by humans...

...If the achievement and reception of Who Framed Roger Rabbit don't do something, at least, to reverse this trend, nothing will...

...Among other reasons, I go to the movies to see places I've never been...

...they created a world that was, to a small child, rich, baroque, and mysterious—indeed, well-nigh symbolistic...

...This film—which does a breathtaking, state-of-the-art job of combining live action with animation—is, quite simply, the closest thing I've ever seen to a perfect piece of film entertainment...

...And don't wait for it to show up on cable either, or on broadcast TV: this is the kind of movie you have to see at a movie theater...

...If you've ever seen Claudette Colbert flashing bluish-green teeth in Boom Town you know what I mean...

...most of the location shots in Big Business took place within three blocks of the theater I saw the movie in...

...Woody Allen...

...Most of the major cartoon characters of that era—Disney's Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, for instance, and Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny, Tweety, Yosemite Sam, and Daffy Duck—are featured in cameos (with, as always, the versatile Mel Blanc doing many of the Warners voices...

...But the film's look and feel and Weltanschauung are pure Warner Brothers—and thank goodness...

...you grow increasingly respectful of the actors—especially Bob Hoskins and Joanna Cassidy—for their ability to make you believe that they actually are interacting with Roger and Jessica Rabbit...

...Now, I deplore the coloring—or "colorization," as the process has come to be known—of films without the consent of the producer or director...

...if a commercial product appeared onscreen, its brand name was invariably "Acme...

...rr he other day, while I was perusing two adjacent newspaper advertisements—one for Coming to America, in which Eddie Murphy towers over the New York skyline, and the other for Crocodile Dundee II, in which Paul Hogan and a curvaceous friend likewise tower over the same skyline—it occurred to me that someday our descendants will watch a few representative American movies of the eighties and will conclude that there weren't any cities in America besides New York...

...To borrow a phrase from the Warners lexicon, that's a load of succotash...

...Some critics have been saying (it's the closest thing most of them have to a major complaint about the film) that Roger, splendid THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 35 though it may be, is for adults more than it is for children...

...I recognized and appreciated their cleverness...

...How many more times are we going to have to watch an awestruck out-of-town protagonist (whether Hogan in Crocodile Dundee or Bette Midler in Big Business) gaze at everything from the skyscrapers along Sixth Avenue to the lowlifes in Times Square...

...The production of colorized prints of, say, It's a Wonderful Life doesn't entail the destruction of the extant black-and-white copies of the film...

...In a world as big as this one, I found it ridiculous that both Big and Big Business—to speak only of recent films—contain major sequences set in the famous Fifth Avenue toy store F.A.O...

...if an American city was mentioned, it was likely to be some place with a funny name like Walla Walla, Cucamonga, or Kokomo...

...It's simply not the government's business to decide which American films—or books or musical compositions, for that matter—are classics...

...In the movies I'm talking about, by contrast, New York's not even a setting, really—it's just a backdrop...

...It doesn't seem possible to sustain such a conceit for nearly two hours, but director Robert Zemeckis, writers Jeffrey Price and Peter Seamon (whose script is adapted from Gary K. Wolf's novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit...

...Among other things, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a tribute to the golden age of the American cartoon, an age which peaked around 1947, the year in which the film is set...

...At this writing, I've seen Roger four times (in two weeks), and as far as I'm concerned, you have to see it at least three times: the first time to gasp in amazement at the technical achievement and, after fifteen minutes or so, to forget the technical achievement entirely and fall into a glorious, childlike belief in the whole magnificent illusion (and laugh at the jokes...

...After watching this movie, you think endlessly Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator 's movie reviewer...

...Schwarz...

...He has something to say about New York...

...These details, too, are remembered in Roger...

...If a Warners character found himself in midair, for instance, he didn't fall until he looked down and noticed he was in midair...

...If altered versions of these films were distributed or exhibited, they would have to be labeled as 'materially altered' or 'colorized,' with a disclaimer that 'certain creative contributors did not participate.' " The thirteen-member board would include among its members the presidents of the American Film Institute, the Directors Guild, and the University Film and Video Association, as well as the chairmen of the film departments at UCLA and NYU...

...Besides, classic films exist in multiple copies...

...This was not at all the rule in Disney cartoons: remember Bambi's mother...

...they just hand out money...

...One can imagine supporters of this measure comparing it to the practice of giving certain buildings landmark status for the purpose of protecting them from drastic alterations or the wrecker's ball...

...about how many things could have gone wrong—a single part miscast, a single scene in which the illusion just didn't come off—and how disastrous it would have been if just one of them had, and how incredible it is that none of them did...

...Roger, to say the least, whets your appetite for animation...

...Those cartoons succeeded for the same reason that Roger does: their creators didn't condescend to the audience...

...Since those days, cartoons have suffered a fate similar to that of elementary-school textbooks: they've been watered down, dumbed-down, vetted by humorless educators and child psychologists for social responsibility and political correctness...

...When are scriptwriters going to grow tired of setting scenes in Rockefeller Center, cinematographers cease dwelling upon the reflection of the Manhattan skyline in the East River, directors stop aiming their cameras down Park Avenue toward the Pan Am Building...

...Likewise, the Warners cartoons had a colorful vocabulary that was all their own...

...You think about what a mess the typical movie is (and after seeing Roger, how easy a typical movie seems to make...

...Once upon a time it was understood—by cartoon makers and critics alike—that wit and sophistication were not for adults only...

...What's more, the Warners cartoon characters were unkillable: Wile E. Coyote routinely got blasted to bits in one scene and was perfectly fine again in the next...

...They also manage to work in a multitude of funny allusions to famous detective movies, among them The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown...

...the second time to follow the Byzantine suspense plot more carefully, to note that virtually everything in the second half of the film is foreshadowed in the first half, and to recognize how wonderfully organized and tightly plotted it is (and laugh at the jokes...

...For, Disney's grand Fantasia notwithstanding, those zippy, sophisticated Warners cartoons of the early postwar years—the "Looney Times" and "Merrie Melodies"--represent the zenith of American cartoon-making: they had a sensibility, a species of humor, and a wacky but thoroughly consistent set of physical laws all their own...

...But to look at Saturday morning TV after seeing this film is to be reminded just how witless and inelegant most children's cartoons are nowadays, and how rare an exception Roger really is...

...With each visit, you notice delightful, funny little details that you hadn't noticed before...

...Nor can this proposed board be compared to one of the national endowments, such as the NEA or the NEH...

...they've had all the magic and the joy committee-meetinged out of them...