Surreal Cartoons

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Cool World

Hey, what’s up, doc? In this kooky and chaotic world, I find that truth is always stranger than fiction, no matter how elaborate or big-budget the fiction is. As of this writing, there is an American president who’s just casually crossing his name off of the big list of famous pedophiles, an economy that has some of the biggest actors and celebrities I know doing commercials for knock-off Candy Crush phone games, and real-life humans are falling in love with and following the cult of their favorite artificial intelligence. Life in 2025 if so absurdly, surreally strange, that I often find comfort in exploring older films and seeing how quaint their wild, strange notions were. One of the best places to explore the strange and unusual is in the realm of animation—particularly adult animation. I’ve dabbled in doodles on this blog just a bit: with my excursion into Anime, my dedication to Hayao Miyazaki, and my more recent exploration of two very similar animated films from the eclectic, electric 80s. I grew up on the typical cartoons—Spongebob, Dexter’s Laboratory, various Batman cartoons and my deep-cut favorite, Chowder—but I also adored adult television cartoons like The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, South Park, and to this day I watch American Dad and Rick and Morty nearly every day. For whatever reason, I find that TV cartoons can play with innuendos and double entendres and adult-themed-subtext more freely, making them accessible and enjoyable to people of all ages and entertainment appetites. But when it comes to the movies, non-Japanese animated films are typically relegated into one of two categories: raunchy adult animation, and wholesome animation for kids—the latter of which occupies the majority of this market, it seems. But back in my day *old man cough* this subtle blend of immature humor and wink-wink adult themes occurred all at once all the time, and tonight I want to explore two animated films that attempted to cater to the tastes of kids, adults, and weirdos of all ages with their surreal sensibilities.

Up first is a film that not only revolutionized the world of special effects, but the film industry as a whole: this is Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I technically saw this film as a child, but the vast majority of its humor and intelligence went right over my tiny head, so I desperately needed to give it a rewatch. The film, written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, is loosely based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, and also draws heavily from the film Chinatown. The film takes place in 1947 Los Angeles and follows private detective Eddie Valliant (Bob Hoskins)—a salt-of-the-earth, not always upstanding but well-meaning citizen who begrudgingly accepts a job in Toon Town, even though his brother was killed by a toon long ago (Dropped a piano on his head. Brutal stuff.) “Toons” coexist with real-life humans, and Toon Town is where the majority of these toons are employed—working as entertainers. Maroon Cartoon Studios owner R.K. Maroon is concerned about the performance of his star Roger Rabbit, a happy-go-lucky rabbit toon who gets tossed around, beaten up, and thrown into every clownish scenario you can think of—and still isn’t up to the studio’s standards. Maroon has a sneaking suspicion that Roger’s wife, Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner, uncredited), is cheating on him, and he wants Eddie to investigate. So Eddie follows the absurdly sexy Jessica Rabbit, watches her perform a sultry little number (with vocals by Amy Irving), and tracks her back to the office of Marvin Acme—owner of both the Acme Corporation and Toontown—and discovers that he’s her sugar daddy, and they’ve been playing “patty cake” behind Roger’s back. Eddie and Mr. Maroon deliver the unfortunate news to Roger Rabbit, who becomes understandably upset but unreasonably kooky upon learning this, and the next day, Marvin Acme is found dead—murdered in a distinctly cartoonish way. Roger Rabbit has the perfect motive for this crime, but he insists that he didn’t kill Mr. Acme. Eddie Valliant is so over the tacky tedium of the toons, but when all of these other toons approach him with scoops, he cannot avoid getting involved— especially when he finds Roger Rabbit hiding in his office. Who did frame Roger Rabbit? Why did his wife have an affair when she claims she loves him? And what to make of this menacing Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who has a gruesome way of doling out his sentences to the toons he despises? Who Framed Roger Rabbit is even funnier, even more creative, and even more impressively neo-noir than I remembered, and the feats of animation, practical and special effects are simply magnificent. It is so honestly, truly funny, in a way that holds up, and utilizes both known and unknown cartoon characters beautifully. This film went through so many scripts and directors and iterations of Eddie Valliant—including Harrison Ford (too expensive), Chevy Chase (wasn’t interested), Bill Murray (quite literally missed the call), Eddie Murphy (misunderstood the concept of toons and humans co-existing), Robin Williams, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, Edward James Olmos, Wallace Shawn, Ed Harris, Charles Grodin and Don Lane—and back when the film was first being pitched around by Disney and producer Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis applied for and was initially rejected to be director. Judge Doom was also almost played by Tim Curry, Christopher Lee, John Cleese, Peter O’Toole, F. Murray Abraham, Roddy McDowall, Eddie Deezen, and Sting. Canadian animator Richard Williams was hired to supervise the animation sequences, but there were a lot of legal hoops to jump through to obtain so many iconic cartoon characters—in a way that mirrors some of the plot of this film. Spielberg convinced Warner Bros., Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions to “lend” their characters to appear in the film with (in some cases) stipulations on how those characters were portrayed. Meanwhile the production budget rapidly expanded and the shooting schedule ran much, much longer than expected. Roger Rabbit was almost voiced by Paul Reubens, then Eddie Deezen, but eventually the role went to Charles Fleischer—who dressed in a Roger Rabbit costume as a stand-in for most of his scenes. This whole post could be dedicated to the technical innovations produced during the three years it took to make this movie, because the cartoonists, lighting designers, special effects crew, stunt workers, and editors made the combination of live-action and cartoon actors really seamless. To pull this off, VistaVision cameras installed with motion-control technology were used for the photography of the live-action scenes, which would be composited with animation, rubber mannequins of Roger Rabbit, Baby Herman, and the Toon Patrol portrayed the animated characters during rehearsals to teach the actors where to look when acting with “open air and imaginative cartoon characters”, many of the live-action props held by cartoon characters were shot on set with the props either held by robotic arms or manipulated with strings, similar to a marionette. In total, 82,080 frames of animation were drawn, and Richard Williams estimates that well over one million drawings were done for the movie. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the epitome of “movie magic”—it’s a film where kid-level ideas received adult-level intelligence on a big-studio budget. The imagery of Jessica Rabbit alone—shimmering dress, one eye covered by cherry-red hair, waist nonexistent, saying “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”—is immeasurably iconic. To say that they don’t make movies like this anymore would be an understatement, but there have been a few brave filmmakers since that have attempted to capture that same magic.

One such attempt came from legendary cartoonist Ralph Bakshi, just four years later, this is his 1992 film Cool World. Following a career resurgence with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Bakshi dreamed up a new project—a horror film—about a cartoonist who created a comic book while in prison that makes him an underground star. The cartoonist would go on to have sex with a femme fatale “doodle” and father a hybrid child with her; half-cartoon, and half-human. The child, growing up resenting its father for abandoning it, would go on to make a pilgrimage to the real world to try to hunt down its father and kill him. This is unfortunately not at all the plot we got in the end with Cool World. Creative disagreements and misguided attempts to make this extremely dark film more friendly-friendly turned this once-cool movie into a disjointed mess of angsty animation and nonexistent narrative. As far as I understood it, Cool World opens in Las Vegas, 1945 (sound familiar?) where Frank Harris (played baby-faced abuser Brad Pitt) is arriving home from the war. He embraces his mom, shows off the spiffy new motorcycle he won in a poker game in Italy, and the two go for a short joyride before they’re struck by a drunk driver. His mother immediately perishes, but Frank is tossed around and triggered into war flashbacks, which somehow magically zaps him into another dimension, another plane, another world: Cool World. This cartoon world is dark and dingy, with flecks of neon and chrome and twisted, futuristic architecture sprinkled in, though the camera mostly shows the seediest looking alleys and establishments. We’re not given much info about this world or why Frank has wound up there before we’re suddenly thrust back into the real world, this time in 1992 Vegas. We’re then introduced to real-life man Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), mysterious comic book artist and current inmate who keeps drawing and having visions of a femme fatale named Holli Would (Kim Basinger.) Holli keeps trying to summon Jack to Cool World, and sometimes it works—but only for a moment. Her seductive voice whispers, “I've been waiting for you darling” just before he crash lands back in his prison cell. Frank Harris, a live-action real-man is still residing in Cool World, and is now seemingly a detective, trying his best to enforce the one major law of the land: doodles and humans shall never have sex. (Yes, that is explicitly stated as the one law of Cool World, I am not minimizing.) Frank confronts Holli about her interactions with the human Jack Deebs and tells her to, “keep your legs crossed and forget about the real world.” But Holli has no plans of stopping her pursuit of Jack, and has grand designs of getting out of Cool World and into the Real World, so the second Jack is out of prison, she summons him back. Jack is suddenly surrounded by cartoonish goons—some of whom seem genuinely menacing and not just goofy—but these troublemakers all behave when Holli enters the room, smoking a cig and chugging a 40 oz of beer, just as any other cartoon dreamgirl does. Jack asks if he’s dreaming, to which Holli responds, “I’m made of ink but I’m no dream” before burning him with her cigarette—illustrating just how real she can be. Meanwhile, as Frank half-ass investigates Holli, he’s falling in love with another sexy doodle named Lonette, who the film makes sure to demonstrate as the good slut to Holli’s bad whore. But Frank knows their love cannot be, since she’s a doodle and he is not. Eventually, Holli’s master plan—which is just… to fuck Jack Deebs—comes to fruition, and their tryst magically turns Holli into a real-life, live-action human. Finally, her motives make sense, the plot of this loosely-constructed story start to sort of fall into place, and yet my confusion remained, because by this point, I was an hour into this movie. Cool World is very cool on the outside, but extremely empty on the inside. The landscapes of this fictional world are very fun and wacky, and the effects were decent enough, but what was missing was everything else. To quote SNL’s Sarah “Squirm” Sherman: “an entire movie predicated on the idea of legit for real just wanting to have sex with Jessica Rabbit…” But Jessica Rabbit, and all of the zany characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, are afforded actual characterization. I know you may be thinking, “Lili, these are horny cartoons, what kinda depth were you expecting?” But because of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s attention to detail, consideration for the audience’s competence and attention spans, and general sense of a somewhat coherent story, my standards were high. Jessica Rabbit is, spoiler alert, proven to be mostly innocent in her film—though she is given enough of a personality to keep us all guessing. But Holli Would is a such a flat portraiture of a femme fatale, who the film itself seems to despise just as much as it lusts after her. I understand that the 90s was full of rampant misogyny, but Holli’s only personality trait is being horny, and the same goes for Lonette—who is seemingly meant to be our hero’s love interest. And on that note, who is the hero of this story? Who is the villain? I’d like to say that Cool World has such a well-developed story with layers of intrigue that really blur the lines between “good” and “evil” and that’s why I cannot determine who we should root for, but I would chock up this lack of distinction to laziness. The only character we’re explicitly told hate and not root for is Holli Would, who I see as more of a tragic figure than a calculated, conniving villain who earns our disdain. But why should we blame Holli for wanting to escape this crudely-drawn cartoon world? And why is she—spoiler alert—punished for wanting more for herself? But it’s not just Holli that bothers me, it’s every obnoxious, uninteresting character in this film. It’s the jerky editing, it’s the half-assed story, it’s the flimsy world-building and absolutely no attention to detail in a setting that could be full of really cool details. Why is Brad Pitt’s character content to stay in Cool World as a detective and why was Gabriel Byrne’s character locked up? These things were only alluded to, and I cannot stand that kind of writing—the kind that assumes the audience won’t notice or care. Cool World was meant to be a much cooler movie—the cast is good, the aesthetic is slick, hell, David Bowie even made a song exclusively for this film. There was discord on the set of this film from the start, as the studio and the director couldn’t see eye-to-eye on what this film should be rated, let alone what it should be about. And despite the amount of multi-orgasmic moaning and titty-popping Kim Basinger does in this film, she still suggested to Bakshi halfway through production that it, “would be wonderful if (I) could show this movie to sick children in hospitals.” I would be less critical of Cool World if it weren’t such a sloppy rip-off of Who Framed Roger Rabbit only way less clever, I would be less critical if the chorus of cacophonous voiceovers in this film didn’t give me a headache. If you want a truly deep cartoon neo-noir, watch Zootopia, if you want a classic cartoon noir, watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but if you want to have a mind-numbing kinda frustrating weirdly boring experience, watch Cool World. Well I’ve said enough for one week, dear reader, but I do thank you for going on this drawn-out journey with me. Until next time, toodles my doodles!