Roger Rabbit Returns!
Interview with Joe Dante and Gary Trousdale for Disney Magazine, March 1998
1987’s
Who Framed Roger Rabbit took the world by storm with its mix of popular characters from classic animation, memorable new characters, brilliantly executed live-action integration, and a whirlwind plot. It spawned several animated Shorts, a TV Series (
Roger Rabbit’s Tales from Toon Town), and a 1991 sequel,
Roger Rabbit’s Toon Platoon. Now Roger and Jessica return to the big screen, along with a couple of “new additions” to the family, in this spring’s
Roger Rabbit: Bunny in the ‘Burbs. And with us to talk about it are Director Joe Dante and Art Director and Animation lead Gary Trousdale.
DM: By the time this film went into active production, Roger Rabbit had largely disappeared from the big screen save for the Shorts playing before Disney titles. What caused the long delay?
GT: Well, the underperformance of
Roger Rabbit 2, frankly.
Roger 1 had been such a smashing success that all assumed that
Roger 2 would do nearly as well. But it didn’t and so Roger went onto the back burner for a while. We did Shorts to keep the IP fresh, but then we made the TV Series and that brought in a whole new fandom.
DM: But the film had been in Production Hell since the early 1990s
GT: Well,
Roger 3 had been in early production back in 1991 ahead of the release of
Roger 2, but then got put on hold with some of the storyboards and pencil tests done. After
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which coincided with the release of the Roger TV series, I was asked to take over.
DM: But the story wasn’t meshing.
GT: The early team had been trying to build off of the big production of
Roger 2 with its war scenes and epic feel, so they literally went nuclear. Roger as a spy, trying to track Soviet nuclear programs since as a toon radiation didn’t really hurt him in more than an amusingly superficial way. Jessica was left unaware, thinking that he worked for ACME Studios on international productions, but then she gets pulled into things. It was kind of looking like
True Lies with Toons, to be honest. We kicked around new ideas, and whether we could salvage some aspect of the nuclear idea just to fit with the fifties setting when a new young animator, Kessie Lou Brabant[1], suggested suburbia. “You know,” she said, “like ACME Studios closed its animation wing, so Roger has to take a menial job and he and Jessica move to the suburbs, but face discrimination.” Or something like that. We all went silent and stared and she turned red, but then we all were, like, “yea, brilliant!” She’d go on to do character animation for Roger and Jessica’s kids.
DM: And this set the tone of the story. It was also where you came in, right, Joe?
JD: Yep. I was just finishing up
A Daffy Movie for Warner and sick to death of the micromanagement, so I called up Tim Burton and asked if he had anything for me. He said “no”, but mentioned that Disney Main was spinning up a Roger Rabbit movie that he thought I’d be perfect for. Given the 1950s nostalgia aspect and the raw toonage and deconstructive plot, I was sold immediately. I worked with Gary to frame out the storyboards to the screenplay, and did some doctoring. The story then wrote itself.
GT: Yes, it was Joe who added the Stepfords, Tom and Angela Stepford, played by John Turturro and Amy Sedaris. The nosy, fake, and bigoted neighbors who are trying to rally the neighborhood against the Toons, who they fear will lower the property values. (Amy Sedaris impersonation) “I mean, who wants roving storm clouds every time one of them gets sad? Who wants to have an anvil fall through your roof?” (normal) Sorry, Amy, that was terrible.
DM: The tagline in the trailer is “They’ve faced war. They’ve faced murder. They’ve faced their own erasure. But now they face the ultimate challenge: life in suburbia!” The bathos of the seeming downgrade in threats aside, how seriously did you take the challenges of suburban life, particularly as a repressed minority?
JD: Deadly serious. We basically took the challenges that an African American family would have faced moving into Levitown in the 1950s and overlayed a Toon veneer. The bathos of the situation drove the humor, but we played it absolutely straight. Amy and John invoked the racist language and mannerisms of their family members growing up to add verity. And we all agreed from the very earliest days to direct this film as though it was an Oscar-bait exploration of race in America. This not only made the bathos that much more prominent, but we refused to give our audience any sort of emotional release valve by winking to the camera. They were going to experience a serious drama on the dangers and cruelty of bigotry and prejudice, but with the ludicrous undercurrent of wacky cartoon antics.
GT: We quickly agreed that much of what made the earlier Roger Rabbit films work was that they took themselves and the situation seriously.
Roger 1 was a serious Film Noir. It even recycled the plot for a
Chinatown sequel.
Roger 2 was a serious War Drama. Of the two,
Roger 1 played better in part because Peter Weir’s real, relatable pathos as Eddie sold the film. Otherwise, it’s just Paul Reubens being wacky for 90 minutes.
DM: Paul Reubens and Kathleen Turner reprise their roles as the voices of Roger and Jessica, of course, and little changes with them other than the situation they face, but the heart of the story is, of course, their kids, Reggie and Jenny Rabbit, voiced by Michael Imperioli and Christina Hendricks.
Inspiration for this film (Image by
Kessielou on Deviant Art)
JD: Yes, Reginald Edward “Reggie” Rabbit and Jennifer Dolores “Jenny” Rabbit. She’s sweet, innocent, and vivacious, he’s cynical, jaded, and not really “bad”, just “drawn that way”. Their potential romantic relationships with the human locals only add to the tensions.
GT: Yeah, in fact the entire plot revolves around Angela Stepford, who is enraged in particular when her daughter Amanda Lee, a disgruntled proto-goth girl played by Jude Barsi, starts hanging out with Reggie. She starts using the fear of “unnatural love” between the humans and Toons to drum up fear and hate against the Rabbit family.
DM: And Jenny has her own troubled romance, in particular the high school jock Troy, played by Seann William Scott.
JD: Yes, Troy is just a delightfully manipulative jerk who thinks that Jenny must be “easy like her mother” and is pretending to be a charming boyfriend even as it’s clear he’s just in it for the “pattycake”. She runs away crying when he tries to forcibly make her do pattycake and then he tells malicious stories about her, which Angela spins as more proof of the “poor moral character” of the Toons, basically slut-shaming Jenny, who truly is innocent. This, of course, is contrasted by Reggie, who, though “drawn bad” with Michael really invoking Brando in
The Wild One, is a total gentleman, erm, gentle rabbit with Amanda, who is the more aggressively physical in the relationship, and he really makes sure that she’s not just acting out to hurt her mother. Of course, mother sees and misinterprets things, setting off the final showdown…
DM: …which we won’t discuss here ahead of the release. Now, without spoiling the big confrontational ending, we do see some real contrasts between the Rabbit family’s rather loving and nurturing nature, with really sweet and meaningful father-son and mother-daughter scenes, with the heavy-handed way that the Stepfords treat Amanda, who is angry and lashing out, even getting a tattoo of Bugs Bunny at one point just to anger her parents, who of course blame Reggie rather than themselves.
GT: Yes (laughs), we ironically had to makeup-over Jude’s own tats while painting on a new one. Of course Roy wanted to know why she couldn’t get a Mickey or Donald tat, and we were, like, “duh”, but Warner went along with it, in part because it felt like a subversive jab at Disney.
JD: Yeah, and I’ll mention that while we focus almost entirely on the Rabbits, we do get some cameos from Baby Herman and Leena Hyena[2], and the obligatory Disney, Warner, HB, and Universal character cameos. We also have a cameo appearance by
Sam & Friends Muppets, including Kermit, Jim using the original “mom’s turquoise coat” version that wasn’t even a frog yet. A lot of younger viewers ask us why Kermit “looks wrong” (laughs).
DM: But you also load the film to the brim with Groening references, including a picture on the mantle that suggests that the Bunyans are related to the Rabbits.
GT: (laughs) Yea, we have a lot of Wayward and Bongo fans on the animation team, and given the setting and humor, the comparisons to both
The Bunyans and
Nuclear Family were unavoidable, so we made them deliberate homages, cleared with Groening, of course. We even recycled the whole nuclear thing from the original Roger the Nuclear Spy story, only now Roger works a humiliating job at the local Simpson Point Nuclear Reactor, scrubbing up the nuclear waste in the reactor chamber since the only apparent effects on him are that he glows green for a few minutes and has to occasionally push a small “mutation”, usually a second mouth or extra arm, back into his skin. He goes through a humiliating “decontamination” sequence before leaving work. We even made a younger Mr. Burns his shift supervisor[3].
DM: As noted,
Roger Rabbit: Bunny in the ‘Burbs deals with some very serious issues, like bigotry, sexual assault, interracial relationships, the environment, child verbal abuse, and the “witch hunt” mindset that can take over a community that feels threatened by the “other”. And yet it is absolutely hilarious. The pure bathos and chaos is in line with the earlier films and TV series. Bathos and irony drive much of it, but good old fashioned cartoon slapstick is prevalent, from Roger’s Rube Goldberg-esque “decontamination” sequence to when an irate Angela literally runs over Roger with her Buick, leaving him a talking pancake[4].
JD: Of course! You have to have all of the looney chaos and harmless violence! We do have some actual possible serious violence in the climax[5], of course, but for the most part we see Roger and occasionally the rest of the family suffer the occasional strategic anvil strike or whatnot.
GT: Yes, of course we still wanted that slapstick silliness of a Roger short, but always tinged with the darkness of the deeper story. We start the film with Roger’s “last” animation job with Jessica and Baby Herman before ACME Studios gets shut down, where he’s comedically smashed and bashed, but we then try to layer that against the existential dread of him losing his job and livelihood when “Cartoons just ain’t in no more,” and they have to lay off the Toons. Similarly, Roger getting pulled into the blades of his old-fashioned manual lawnmower and spat out while trying to maintain the
Better Homes and Gardens look, which becomes both a symbol of his family’s awkward attempts at assimilation and a nice contrast to what happens in the end[6].
DM: And a heartwarming end it is, not to reveal too much. Let’s talk about the animation itself. This was not a traditionally hand-drawn and composited affair like in the original
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was it?
JD: No, it was not. The time and materials cost of the animation can be expensive all by itself, but then you have to effectively run everything through twice on camera to assure eye-lines and the like, but Gary had some ideas for something more innovative.
GT: Yes, we’d already experimented with using digital puppetry techniques and digital rotoscoping for
Lost in La Mancha, but then they’d used some digital puppetry to bring Fin and Marla to life at DisneySea and we wondered if we could use it for Roger Rabbit. We experimented with some test footage using all-digital characters, but it didn’t feel like a Toon anymore. But then we looked at some of the 3D-to-2D Projection technology they’d developed for the combat sequences in
War Stories and wondered if that could work.
DM: So, you used digital puppetry and pantomime rigs to interact with the live actors, used that to animate 3D vector wireframes, and then used the planar-projection techniques to morph it into 2D images reminiscent of hand-drawn animation.
GT: Basically, yes! It was more complex than that, and we needed to touch up a lot in post using light pens and the DATA and Pixar tech, but yes, basically that.
JD: One set of takes with the puppeteer on set, trying out different adlibs, and then the animators composite the image on it, much of it already automated! We could print low-res rough cuts on the set as dailies! In a few more years when they are able to have practical digital cameras[7] we’ll be able to hybridize animation with live action as you shoot!
DM: And when that moment comes, we’ll be sure to talk to you about it! Good luck with your new picture at the box office![8]
Roger Rabbit: Bunny in the ‘Burbs is now playing in theaters near you.
[1] Fictional, but named in honor of DeviantArt artist
Kessielou, whose art inspired the plot. Hat tip!
[2] In the third act Troy becomes the target of her obsessive “love” in a turnaround on his sexual predation.
[3] “Pitiful, Rabbit, just pitiful! That waste should have been properly disposed of in the local lake hours ago!”
[4] Not a major spoiler, as it plays in the trailer.
[5] In the conclusion, an irate Angela, driven to madness, comes after Roger and Reggie with a paint sprayer loaded with solvent. Her daughter Amanda takes a spray for them (thankfully wearing goggles!), saving them.
[6] Obligatory happy ending: The Stepfords are taken away by cops after a literally-insane rampage that physically and emotionally tears apart the perfect neighborhood, sees their carefully manicured façade of Suburban Gentility stripped away, sees 17-year-old Amanda emancipated by a judge, and the rest of the neighbors, feeling guilty, welcoming in the Rabbits and even other toons to the now integrated neighborhood. In the last fast-forward shot, Reggie and Amanda are publicly holding hands, other Toons and some non-white families are moving in with the neighbors greeting them, and even the perfectly-manicured lawns and gardens of the homes on the streets are now full of happy singing cartoon flowers and trees in addition to the organic plants. “Well, that’s
one neighborhood integrated!” says Roger cheerfully and sincerely. “Only ninety-four thousand, three hundred and seven to go!!” Reggie sighs and rolls his eyes. “Yep. Full integration any week now I’m sure, pops,” Reggie adds with full irony.
And yes, the irony of the monochrome casting in an anti-racist narrative will get called out at the time by some, and called out much more in hindsight.
[7] The
first digital camera dates from the 1970s, so the future for digital film production was foreseeable if you knew where to look,
[8] Will make a solid $182 million against a $75 million budget driven by good reviews and word of mouth.