Disney ‘Rabbit’ Hops Into the Spotlight

Imagine Bob Hoskins hacking furiously at a pair of handcuffs.

The cuffs lock his left wrist to a bug-eyed cartoon bunny--who looks unnervingly real in a pen-and-ink sort of way.

Impatient, the rabbit slips his hand out of one cuff, and holds it up while a sweaty Hoskins saws on.

For 80 years or so, animators have struggled to match their creatures with real people in just that sort of perfect visual trick. According to some animation sources, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a summer film that has been held under tight wraps by Walt Disney Co. and producer Steven Spielberg, has finally gotten it right.

After months of Hollywood gossip about budget overages and production disputes, “Roger Rabbit” is nearing completion at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic facility in Northern California. The film is set for national release June 24.

Based on “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?,” a detective-spoof novel written by Gary Wolf, the movie had been rumored to cost as much as $50 million. One source familiar with the film recently said the actual cost was under $40 million, but substantially more than the $30 million price-tag originally projected in a 1986 offering document circulated by Disney’s Silver Screen III movie financing partnership. Disney declined to comment on the film’s budget.

In a further hint of trouble, several “Roger Rabbit” animators privately complained in the last year that director Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future”) complicated their task by keeping the camera in almost constant motion while filming.

That made it difficult--particularly during a complicated car-chase scene--to match up the movie’s human stars with a panoply of cartoon characters who range from the newly invented Roger to such old-familiars as Warner Bros.’ Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, the Fleischers’ Betty Boop, Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker and a host of Disney characters. (The film will mark the first time that these characters will have appeared on the screen together.)

In some quarters, however, there is now a growing conviction that Disney, Spielberg, Lucas and Zemeckis have created a potential blockbuster.

“The industry word I’m hearing is ‘big risk, big reward,’ ” said Mara Balsbaugh, an entertainment analyst with Smith Barney, Harris Upham, a New York-based securities firm.

“It’s going to be a big, big picture,” predicted Milton Moritz, an executive with Pacific Theatres, which plans to open the film at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and other theaters.

Successful or not, the film certainly promises to be different.

“Roger Rabbit” is based on the premise that cartoon types inhabit the same reality we do, but not in quite the same way. “There’s a fifth dimension, with a living, breathing, three-dimensional cast of characters,” explained Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Disney’s movie-making unit.

Most of the “Toons,” as they are called in the screenplay written by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, work for movie studios like the fictional Maroon Cartoons, and are second-class citizens in a Hollywood that doesn’t really care for critters who say things like “Boing!” and who conjure up stars when bopped on the head.

Hoskins, as a Philip Marlowe-like detective whose brother was killed by a Toon, descends into tawdry Toontown. And the rest could become cartoon history, if a team of artists led by British animation director Richard Williams--with help from the Lucas computers--has really managed to combine cartoons and people in a single, believable milieu. Williams won an Oscar in 1972 for his animated version of “A Christmas Carol.”

Film makers have tried to achieve that effect at least since 1909, when Emil Cohl placed a smiling orb over a crowd of live actors in “Man in the Moon.” The most famous of these early efforts was the “Out of the Inkwell” series, in which Koko the Klown bedeviled creator Max Fleischer. Koko’s popularity spawned a host of similar shorts with animated characters teasing live actors.

Walt Disney reversed the process in the “Alice in Cartoonland” films (1923-27), his first nationally distributed series. Alice, played by a child actress, seemed to inhabit an animated world filled with cartoon characters.

Some later combination films were technically impressive. As Uncle Remus, James Baskett seemed to walk into a cartoon world in Disney’s “Song of the South” (1946). Gene Kelly and Jerry the Mouse danced together with casual aplomb in MGM’s “Anchors Aweigh” (1945), and the effect of Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke entering a chalk drawing in “Mary Poppins” constituted the state of the art in 1964.

But the two-dimensional drawn characters have never quite fit into the “real” world of the set--even when Disney artists tried to make Donald Duck more three-dimensional by giving him airbrushed highlights and shadows for a real-life beach scene in “Three Caballeros” (1944).

On “Roger Rabbit,” the media are combined by shooting live footage first, then printing each frame as an enlarged photostat. The animator puts drawing paper over each stat and attempts to coordinate his character’s motion with the live action. When the characters interact very closely, as they do in the new film, an error as tiny as the thickness of a line can spoil the effect.

To heighten and hold the feeling that cartoons share the actors’ reality, artists and technicians at ILM are using computer graphics to create shadows and highlights that correspond to lighting on the set. (Several artists emphasized that the computers are only being used in post-production: They don’t want the machines getting credit for their traditional hand-drawn animation.)

Those who worked on “Roger Rabbit” had to sign a three-page confidentiality agreement that essentially forbade them to tell anyone anything about the production. But the international animation community is small and tightly knit, and stories about the film’s problems and solutions have been circulating since pre-production work began several years ago. The movie was shot and animated both here and in London.

Despite earlier complaints, several animators who worked on the film have said it is technically dazzling--and very funny.

Said one artist: “After the stodgy direction in so many contemporary animated features, it’s exciting to work on a film that can hold its own cinematically with the top live-action pictures.”

Katzenberg declined to speculate about “Roger Rabbit’s” prospects, or to predict that it might become a model for future Disney films.