My Favorite Richard Williams Film

Let's get one thing straight.  It might be Robert Zemeckis's name listed as director of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" but the movie is Richard Williams' triumph.  The Academy knew it, awarding him a special Oscar for his achievements as the film's animation director and chief character designer.  His fellow animators and filmmakers knew it, voting him "The Animator's Animator" in a London Times poll in 1990. Audiences, alas, never caught on, and Williams never really got the wider recognition for being one of the greatest animators who ever lived.

I respect and admire Zemeckis, but "Roger Rabbit" could not have been made without the work of Richard Williams.  Combining live action and traditional hand-drawn animation had been done before, but live actors interacting with animated characters to the degree that they do in "Roger Rabbit" would not have been possible without animation as fluid and spatially complex as what Williams and his team provided.  Known for his high standards and high ambitions, Williams was always described as demanding but inspiring. He was capable of generating astonishing work that violated all the usual rules of animation. He could accommodate a moving camera and shifting perspectives, even though that meant all the animation in "Roger Rabbit" had to be painstakingly drawn "on ones," or frame for frame with the live action footage.  Williams did plenty of the actual animating himself, claiming that he worked on nearly every scene in the movie.    

So Roger Rabbit and the other "toons" could splash in live action water, bump live action lamps, and adjust live action clothing.  This was thanks in large part to the efforts of Zemeckis and his practical effects team. But it's thanks to Williams and the other animators that the character do all these things while moving and reacting like the old school squash and stretch Tex Avery cartoons.  And they were also responsible for the resurrection of dozens and dozens of beloved classic cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to Betty Boop, in order to populate the world of "Roger Rabbit." It's one thing to conceive of Donald Duck and Daffy Duck having a piano duel at the Ink and Paint Club, but it's quite another to actually see the two of them in their prime, banging away at those real, physical pianos, executing wild gag after gag at lightning speeds.      

And so, Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit are able to convincingly embark on their buddy comedy/detective noir, solving the mystery of who killed Marvin Acme and foiling the plans of the evil Judge Doom.  And so, we get to explore this marvelous universe where humans and toons coexist seamlessly in a nostalgic 1940s Hollywood. At its heart, the movie is an excuse to pay homage to all the animation greats of the golden era of cartoon short subjects, full of references and in-jokes and countless cameos.  The original characters, like Roger Rabbit, Jessica, and Baby Herman, all contain elements inspired by specific cartoon shorts, and feel like products of that era. Jessica is a Tex Avery pin-up girl. Roger is an amalgam of Warner and Disney characters - he's got Mickey's gloves, Porky's bow-tie, Goofy's pants, and a Mel Blanc-worthy lisp.      

As a kid, I loved "Roger Rabbit" for its silliness and its madcap nature, for breaking the barrier between the human and cartoon worlds in a way that I'd never seen before, and wondered why they didn't do more often.  After all, it looked so easy and natural for Eddie and Roger to share the screen together. As an adult, however, I marvel at how the filmmakers got all those disparate elements to make coherent visual sense. Now I know that it took multiple teams of artists months and months of Herculean effort to breathe life into that world and those characters, frame by frame.  And that the work was done with an inordinate amount of care, under the guidance of an animation director who wouldn't settle for anything other than brilliance.  

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" is a film that could never be made again for a long list of reasons - and keep in mind that the studios did try for years to make a sequel.  But even if you got all the studios to play nice and the legal matters squared away, nobody does traditional animation on the level that Richard Williams did it anymore.  Sure, there's plenty of talent out there, and improvements in technology have helped things along, but Williams' superhuman dedication to his craft and yen for doing the impossible aren't so easy to replace.

What I've Seen - Richard Williams

Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut (2006)

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