I'm An Adult, I Swear.

19990620: Hope, Fish, Despair

The lady is a succubus, which in this setting is mostly human but with superpowered pheromones that passively make humans aroused just by being in the same room and essentially drug people out of their minds if she touches them directly. [The effect is so strong that there’s an entire government agency devoted to observing (from a long distance) all known succubi to make sure they aren’t starting suicide cults or going on murder-rape binges or whatever.] This causes her a variety of problems in life; she has to get up extremely early and stay at work late to take mostly-empty trains in order to avoid being in a crowded metal box full of humans, for example. But worst is her nonexistent love life, because how can you ever be confident that somebody has genuine romantic feelings for you if you’re supernaturally attractive to everybody? Is it ever morally acceptable to have sex if holding hands is effectively a date-rape drug? 

The guy is a perfectly ordinary biology teacher, who crashed into her in the halls on his first day and got a huge dose of aphrodisiac. But she is a Respected Colleague so it would be Highly Unprofessional to think of her that way, not to mention how Inappropriate it would be for a high school teacher to do or say anything while there might be students around, and wait a minute wouldn’t treating her differently just because of her biology be Super Racist? so obviously it is his Duty to act Perfectly Normal and pretend that he Feels Nothing.

She sees that he seems to have no reaction, and this sparks her interest. Is he immune to her powers? Clearly this requires further investigation! For entirely scientific purposes, not because if he falls for her he’d be the first guy she could trust to do so for legitimate non-chemical reasons (and totally not because she might be able to bone him without feeling bad about it).

what ah you so excaitedabaaht MAYQUAY

eeeh eeh eeeh

1. With Roger’s voice actor standing off camera, Bob Hoskins acts into empty air and frantically sawing at his handcuff, continually looking up and down at different visual marks of various depths. Look at the slow pan up of his eyes in gif 4, and then the quick shift to his side. Think about how, on set, he was looking at nothing. 

2. Starting in gif 2, The box must be made to stop shaking, either by concealed crew member, mechanism, or Hoskins own dextrousness, as he is doing all of the things mentioned in point 1. 

3. In all gifs, Roger’s handcuff has to be made to move appropriately through a hidden mechanism. (If you watch the 4th gif closely you can see the split second where it is replaced by an animated facsimile of the actual handcuff, but just for barely a second.)

4. The crew voluntarily (we know this because it is now a common internal phrase at Disney for putting in extra work for small but significant reward) decided to make Roger bump the lamp and give the entire scene a constantly moving light source that had to be matched between the on set footage and Roger. This was for two reasons, A) Robert Zemeckis thought it would be funnier, and B) one of the key techniques the crew employed to make the audience instinctually accept that Toons coexisted with the live action environment was constant interaction with it. This is why, other than comedy, Roger is so dang clumsy. Instead of isolating Toons from real objects to make it easier for themselves, the production went out of its way to make Toons interact more with the live action set than even real actors necessarily would, in order to subtly, constantly remind the audience that they have real palpable presence. You can watch the whole scene here, just to see how few shots there are of Roger where he doesn’t interact with a real object. 

The crew and animators did all of this with hand drawn cell animation without computerized special effects. 1988, we were still five years out from Jurassic Park, the first movie to make the leap from fully physical creature effects to seamlessly integrating realistic computer generated images with live action footage. Roger’s shadows weren’t done with CGI. Hoskin’s sightlines were not digitally altered. Wires controlling the handcuff were not removed in post. 

The racism in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is very explicit. In this world, Toons are definitely seen as a lower class to humans. This is probably most overtly shown in the Ink & Paint club which allows for Toon performers, but not Toon audience members. This mirrors real life establishments from the same era that would allow black performers, but not allow black people to mix with the audience. The fact that Toon Town is it’s own segregated place kept out of view by a giant wall is also telling about how Toons are treated by those around them.

Toons almost EXCLUSIVELY are used for the entertainment purposes of humans, and are treated as commodities. You don’t see Toons anywhere else in the city except as workers going to the Maroon Cartoon Studios. They trade Toons with other studios (”got them on loan from Disney, him and half the cast of Fantasia”) and pay them literal peanuts instead of money, exploiting them for their labor. Even Jessica Rabbit is seen as a commodity. She was “drawn” to be sexually evocative to humans, and she clearly resents it (her famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” line).

What does it say about this society where they allow a human “judge” to roam Toon Town outright MURDERING Toons for committing small infractions and crimes? It says to me that Toons are seen as such a lower class that humans feel like they need to “control” them and impose their will on theirs through capital punishment. Humans in this world essentially are saying “You’re here for MY entertainment, and if you break any laws we’ll KILL you.”

I mean, the whole PLOT of the film is about a real-estate developer trying to destroy a Toon neighborhood to make millions on highway development. Heck, even the subplot is about a detective who’s backstory is his brother was killed by a Toon and that’s why he’s racist against them. Eddie’s arc in the film is to learn that just because a Toon killed his brother, he shouldn’t resent ALL Toons. Swap out the word “Toon” for “black person” and you can see a lot of parallels to real-life class racism.

the only people I pity in this WFH situation are artists whose spouse/family/roommates now spend their whole day at home and they walk into the artists’ room while they’re drawing emotional stuff and making hideous faces