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The Animated Arena of ‘Roger Rabbit’ : Integration of Cartoons With Live Action Will Set Standard

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For 43 years, whenever anyone discussed the difficult process of combining animation with live action in movies, the model of success has been the scene in “Anchors Aweigh” where Gene Kelly does a bouncy dance with Jerry the mouse.

From today on, the model will be “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Pick your scene.

“Roger Rabbit,” the collaborative brainchild of film director Robert Zemeckis and animation genius Richard Williams, displays the most inventive, effective integration of animation and live action ever attempted.

Previously, the problems of having actors work with invisible co-stars have been enormous, even for those few frames or minutes where it was occasionally attempted. Even when it has worked in the past--in the wonderful fantasy sequence of “Mary Poppins,” for instance--the animation seemed flat over the live action.

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In “Roger Rabbit,” estimated to have cost $45 million, the media have been remarkably blended--not just sandwiched, but set seemingly in the same space.

It will be a footnote for film historians that when Zemeckis and Williams met for the first time to discuss marrying their skills, both agreed the mix would not work.

“When I met Bob in London, I told him that I hated combinations of animation and live action--they embarrass me,” said Williams, the animation Wunderkind who is perhaps best known for his animated lead-ins to Blake Edwards’ “Pink Panther” movies.

“The cartoon cancels out the live action and the live action cancels out the cartoon, and you can’t believe in either one--and he agreed with me.”

Zemeckis, who relied on conventional special effects for the hit “Back to the Future,” acknowledged his reservations at that first meeting with Williams, but said both quickly talked themselves into trying it.

Zemeckis, in a phone interview from New York, said he appealed to Williams’ sense of invention by acting out the opening sequence of the film, demonstrating how his actors and Williams’ characters could work together.

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“The change that came over Richard’s face was amazing,” Zemeckis said. “If he had been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared over his head. He said, ‘That just might work!’ and immediately started embellishing the idea.”

Williams has won numerous awards for his animation and for the last 23 years has been working on his own animated feature with the working title “The Cobbler and the Thief.” It was portions of that film, brought to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Zemeckis by “Roger Rabbit” co-producer Robert Watts, that convinced the director the film could be done.

“I was getting very depressed looking for someone to do the animation,” said Zemeckis. “I knew the script for ‘Roger Rabbit’ had a premise that could make the viewer suspend disbelief if we could find an animator with the right sensibility. I didn’t want to do something flat and boring, and I was struck by the way Richard twisted the perspective in that segment of ‘The Thief.’ I decided I would only do the film if Richard worked on it--there was no second choice.”

Zemeckis and Williams discovered what they really disliked were the unwritten rules governing the blending of animation and live action: Don’t move the live action camera, and keep physical interaction between the live actors and the cartoon characters to a minimum. The more camera movement, the more difficult it is for artists to match their drawings to the action. The more interaction, the more difficult it is to make the interaction seem real.

Williams, who had been experimenting with live action and animation combinations in a series of soft drink commercials, dismissed those rules as “designed to make it easier for the animators.”

“I told Bob I was convinced every single rule about the use of animation and live action was baloney and if we made the film, I’d throw them all out and let him move the camera,” Williams said. “We agreed that the key to making the combination effective would be interaction: Laurel and Hardy are funny because they’re constantly getting tangled up physically with each other. We thought the cartoon characters should always be affecting their environment or getting tangled up with the live actors.”

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For “Roger Rabbit,” the film makers disdained computer graphics and went with old-fashioned animation techniques, which require artists to draw thousands of individual panels or “cels” that are then filmed and mixed with the live action.

Zemeckis shot his live-action scenes allowing plenty of room for the animators to draw in the cartoon characters. But it often left the actors playing a scene in a void.

“Bob (Hoskins) understood what he had to do, and he accepted it as a challenge and set out to make the technique work,” said Zemeckis. “He’d stand by the side of the set and practice lifting a model of Roger by the ears, memorizing how high his hand would have to go for them to make eye contact.”

What set “Roger Rabbit” results apart from earlier efforts were the shadows that gave the drawn characters an extraordinary three-dimensionality. The crews at Industrial Light & Magic shot at least five additional cels of shadows and highlights for every character in each frame. To simulate the soft-edged look of real shadows, these cels were shot out of focus and underexposed. The areas of shadow were built up in layers, like a watercolor painting.

A short test film made at ILM looked so good, according to Williams, that it “married Amblin and Disney.” As “Roger Rabbit” went into production, Williams moved out of his Soho studio and into the offices of the newly organized “Disney Animation, UK Ltd.,” where he began assembling talented young animators from all over the world.

“When we first started talking to Richard, he said he’d like to keep things small and do the film with maybe four or five animators,”’ said Peter Schneider, vice president of feature animation for Disney. “We ended up with 300 people working in London, and a second unit in Los Angeles did an additional 10 minutes of animation for the film.”

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The 1947 setting of the story enabled the animators to offer an extended homage to the classic cartoons of that era. Ironically, their work often looked more polished than their models. Tex Avery and the Warner Bros. directors could never produce such lavish visuals. The complicated pan shots in the “Maroon Cartoon” that opens the film probably cost more than an entire Warners short of the ‘40s.

“We tried not to draw like 1988,” said Williams. “I told everyone, ‘We’re trying to celebrate the animation of 1947. That means we have to be those guys--as much as we can--so we have to draw like them at least. No creativity, please.’ ”

Although animators tend to be highly critical of their own work, the artists are unanimous in their praise of Zemeckis’ leadership.

“Even when his evaluation of your work was tough, it was always intelligent and fair,” said Tom Sito, who animated a scene where Judge Doom’s weasel henchmen laugh themselves to death. “Instead of fussing about details in your drawings, he focused on what the audience would get out of the scene. When you finished talking with him, you knew your work was stronger and more effective.”

“I gave them directions the same way I would an actor in rehearsal,” said Zemeckis. “I worked with the performances. Make this sadder or happier or broader. Very often, they’d sketch a pose I struck as I explained what I wanted, then we’d refine that further.”

The decision by Williams and Zemeckis not to lock down the camera complicated the animators’ work. Whenever the camera moved, the animators had to adjust the size and position of their characters in each frame to match the shifting point of view.

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“Having the camera constantly moving at such a subtle pace was scary at first,” said Dave Spafford, who drew the piano duel between Donald Duck and Daffy Duck. “But it helped keep the characters alive. If the live actor is standing still and the camera is locked down, the animation can go dead and the separation between the cartoon character and the actor becomes obvious. But when the camera’s moving, it covers up that separation.”

The artists soon discovered that the moving camera posed the most serious problems when a character stood still. Because the point of view was continually shifting, the cartoon figures seemed to slide on the backgrounds.

“When a character walks or runs, his feet only come in contact with the ground for a few frames,” explained supervising animator Andreas Deja. “But when the character is standing there and the camera is moving up and down and in little circles, it’s just about impossible to lock him onto the ground--his feet seem to slip.”

“One other problem that we had was that Bob Hoskins was so good,” said Spafford. “He stole the show in every shot. If he seemed more animated than the cartoon characters, we’d have really been in trouble--we had to pull out all the stops to compete with him.”

“This was one of the most difficult, time-consuming and challenging projects ever to come across our desks,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney Studios.

“Although we hope to do more with this technique, we haven’t really had the time to catch our breaths and understand just what it is that’s been done. But whether “Roger Rabbit” proves a success or a failure in the marketplace, I think it has been a pioneering effort by this company--one that defines the type of venture Walt Disney himself was famous for.

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“We like to think this film is at the center of the grandest tradition of innovation in technology and storytelling that we inherited from him.”

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