![]() ![]() So before long, a Roger dopple shows up and wants Eddie to solve his murder. A cartoon cat amuses itself by "conjuring up some mental mice, which it stalked around the room." And most importantly, 'toons can summon up "dopples," short-lived, independent, sentient copies of themselves that can be used for dangerous stunt work, like getting squashed with pianos and safes. 'Toons do other weird, cartoony things in Wolf's world: When they drink alcohol ("toonshine" being the beverage of choice), little puffs of smoke come out of their ears and have to be shooed away. In fact, one of the reasons Jessica Rabbit is considered sexy by humans is that she "suppresses" her word balloons, and only talks with her husky voice. As Wolf establishes in a number of cases, word balloons tend to endure and become obnoxious detritus in the streets. Eddie even finds a word balloon for the gun that killed Roger–it says "Bang," naturally–and measures it to determine the caliber of the murder weapon. My contract…"–to determine his last words, but they also check the brittleness of the balloon to determine how long Roger has been dead. The police use its text contents–"No fair! You got me everything? Jessica. Shortly thereafter, Roger is shot dead in his apartment, and the only clue is his final world balloon. The book begins with Roger Rabbit hiring Eddie Valiant to investigate Roger's contract with a Hollywood studio: A pair of shady but successful characters named the DeGreasy brothers have exclusive rights to Roger, but they only use him as a bit player, and they won't release him to work for someone else. Word balloons even play a significant role in the novel's murder-mystery plot. So are all the specific uses of familiar cartoon characters, like Daffy and Donald Duck's crazed piano duet, or Betty Boop's sad stint as a barroom cigarette girl: Pretty much the rest of the film–including characters like Eddie's dead brother Teddy, the weasel gangsters, Judge Doom, Valiant's longsuffering love interest Dolores, Marvin Acme, and Benny the Cab–are original creations of the film. Zemeckis imported some of the characters intact–the hapless, babbling cartoon bunny Roger Rabbit his sexy humanoid 'toon wife Jessica Rabbit Baby Herman, who has an infant's looks and a rich, jaded fortysomething's taste in women, booze, and cigars and above all, cranky private eye Eddie Valiant, a man more interested in his next slug of bourbon than his next clue. Virtually no scene in the book has a mirror in the movie. The plot, on the other hand, Zemeckis had no use for, so he chucked it out the window. ![]() ![]() What fun would that be to create visually? Here was a world where animated beings and humans hung out together, where cartoons were live-action films shot with animated stars as actors, where Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny were just successful Hollywood players. So Wolf's strange little 1981 noir novel must have been a conceptual treasure trove for Zemeckis. ![]() Fox playing all the members of his own future family in the Back To The Future films in recent years, it's given us the creepy but rapidly evolving motion-capture animated films The Polar Express and Beowulf. In the early days, that obsession gave us flying Deloreans and Michael J. Who Framed Roger Rabbit director Robert Zemeckis has long been obsessed with special effects and creating cartoony worlds where anything can happen. ![]()
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