Forget It, Eddie, It's Toon Town
An Apparatus Approach to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
[Contains: Spoilers]
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) – Apparatus
Outside of my PhD dissertation, Pretty Woman (1990), and The Lion King (1994), the film I have thought the most about is Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I love this movie. I have seen it a million times and I could watch it a million more and still get new things out of it. So, this week, wanting to watch a comfort film, I thought it would be a fun challenge to analyse it properly and purposely shift my viewing of a film I’ve known my entire life to appreciate my love from a new perspective and understand the object of that love even more thoroughly.
One such revelation about this film I love so much is embarrassing. In all the times I had seen it, at the very start I realised I had never fully acknowledged that the film is set in 1947 Hollywood, a period and place I now know very well. The Review Roulette wheel did not grace us with Contextual History as our approach though. Instead, the challenge is to think about Who Framed Roger Rabbit as a reflection of our society and what the film can say about the structures and superstructures of our world through an Apparatus approach.
There are two areas to focus on here really: 1) the Chinatown (1974) resonances of a detective, neo-noir, gritty, dark kind of vibe used to tell an approximation of the real stories of Los Angeles’s expansion over the first half of the 20th century; 2) the heavily allegorical resonances of racial segregation in the mid-century. Both are intertwined and so carefully developed throughout the film in an exquisitely written and performed mystery. If you have not seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the spoilers start now.
I really don’t like spoiling films in reviews, especially big twists and mysteries, but in order to talk about these things, it is necessary to reveal one of the elements of the main mystery. In this fictional Hollywood, the Toons (animated characters) have their own living spaces in a fully animated, seemingly densely populated urban district called Toon Town. Historically in our real world, LA expanded in the early 20th century and annexed neighbouring cities and towns for various benefits (e.g. water access (the superstructure of Chinatown)). In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the acquisition of Toon Town is integral to the mystery and echoes that real world expansion of the city with a particular focus on the transportation industry.
In this fictitious Hollywood, a company called Clover Leaf is surreptitiously purchasing various arms of the transportation industry and acquiring strategic real estate. Ultimately we discover that Clover Leaf – the logo of which is four highway on and off ramps in the shape of a clover – is a run by the film’s villain seeking to raze Toon Town to the ground and build a freeway with strip malls and tire salons and rapidly prepared food. The crux of the plan is that Clover Leaf, as sole owner of the tram company Red Car especially is poised to shut down public transportation and force people living in the LA region to buy cars, drive the freeway, and generate profits by extortion.
If you know me in real life, you know I am a huge fan of public transportation and the accessibility it affords for everyone (when free), especially people like me with disabilities (when properly developed, maintained, and managed). It isn’t the central reason I love this film, but I do deeply love that a contemporaneously well-performing and very well-remembered film (from Disney no less) holds at its heart a condemnation of not only the privatisation and defunding of public transit but also the means by which a corporation strategically acquires properties in order to shut down competition and makes everything significantly worse for everyone in the process. The echoes of our own superstructures and the foreshadowing of what Disney would become not long after this film was released are pitch perfect commentaries on our real world and the shady deals made behind closed doors in 4D chess formations all to nickel and dime individuals just trying to live their lives.
Many of those individuals just trying to live in Who Framed Roger Rabbit are the toons. The plan to raze their community by way of a paint thinner concoction that will literally melt any toon from existence is pretty egregious and definitely (allegorically) racist. It is never explicitly said that the toons are second-class citizens or an allegory for people of colour, but they are segregated, and they are only shown in service or acting roles in the live-action part of town, and their entire community is being so flippantly threatened as the villainous parent company decides for them that it’s time to be displaced to maximise profits for only a couple already rich white people as the spirit of communities and walkable towns is destroyed. So, I think it’s pretty fair to draw quite a direct parallel between that aspect of the film and the superstructures of our own society deciding when the homes and livelihoods of a minority population need decimating.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a phenomenal film for the way it portrays such serious topics and reflections of our real world through an immensely entertaining, incredibly creative, innovative, impressive film that brought major 20th century icons from a number of studios (most strikingly many from Warner Bros) together in a Disney release. It’s a feat of talents and business acumen alike that most definitely was the challenge of a lifetime not only for the animators and cinematographers but also for the intellectual property rights lawyers in multiple major studios at the time. The way it spins a perfect mystery while leaning into satirical commentaries and slightly parodic homages to the great noirs of the past all in an incredibly entertaining package, it’s just simply one of the better films I’ve ever seen. And it even has a Cocktail reference.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Contextual History
As I said, I never really acknowledged in any of my previous watches that the setting is 1947 Hollywood. The choice is a fascinating one. It clearly situates right into noir territory largely and very specifically aligns with the mid-century expansion of freeways in LA. In various scenes we get some other signifiers such as clothing choices, newsreels in cinemas, the aesthetic of cars and trams, and more specifically a recurring black WWII veteran in the bar scenes. My favourite nod to the moment, however, is a very quick headline when we are treated to some of PI Eddie Valiant’s (Bob Hoskins) formerly solved cases establishing his past work with exonerating toons specifically. One of these headlines reads, “Goofy Cleared of Spy Charges” as our only real glimpse into the anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood in 1947.
Thanks for the reminder of how good this film is. When I first watched it as an adult - having watched it over and over as a kid - I actually cried at its perfection. I always take it as the second part in the greatest quadrilogy of Hollywood movies from 1985-1990.