Things Really Hopping at ‘Roger Rabbit’ Premiere

“I just hope I never have to draw another rabbit,” Richard Williams said with a sly grin.

Others at Touchstone’s swank Radio City Music Hall send-off for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” Tuesday evening seemed understandably more excited about the hare. After all, the director of animation for the landmark live action-animation film had been living with Roger night and day for more than three years.

But the 55-year-old London-based animator said he had finished his last drawing only 20 days earlier for the film, which a Disney executive earlier estimated had cost under $40 million to produce.

Now Williams and director Robert Zemeckis and human stars Bob Hoskins, Joanna Cassidy and Kathleen Turner (the uncredited voice of sultry Jessica Rabbit), co-producer Frank Marshall, screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman and a dozen or so lead animators, among others, stood savoring the enthusiastic critical response.

Casually dressed in a blue V-neck sweater and open-collared shirt, flanked by two giant Roger Rabbit ice sculptures, Williams autographed a stuffed Roger Rabbit doll for a fan. All around him in the Grand Foyer beneath the lobby of the classic Art Deco theater, several hundred invited guests sported Roger Rabbit lapel pins handed out at the door.

Nearby, Charles Fleischer, the manic voice behind the rabbit, was sounding a slightly different note.

“I would be happy to do Roger Rabbit for the rest of my life,” said the actor-comedian, who, like the director, producers and screenwriters, was wearing the blue and yellow, polka-dot bow tie that his cartoon alter-ego wears in the film.

“I love Roger. I think he’s the greatest cartoon character of all time,” Fleischer said. “There’s never been a cartoon character with Roger’s depth. As great as I think Mickey (Mouse) is, I don’t think he could sustain a feature.”

The bewhiskered Hoskins, who as hard-boiled private eye Eddie Valiant had to hold his own acting against an empty space, said the role was “the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life.” To show just how tough, he held out his palm and asked a guest to “lock” his eyes on it. Then he whisked his hand away. “See? You can’t help it. Your eyes move out.”

That, the actor said, was the kind of difficulty he faced delivering lines to a character that had yet to be drawn into the empty space next to him. How was he able to pull it off? “You hallucinate,” he said.

Turner acknowledged that she didn’t want her name in the 7 1/2-minute roll of credits. She participated, the actress said, “largely out of friendship and fun. Bob (Zemeckis, who directed her in “Romancing the Stone”) proposed this to me as a neat thing to do in a new kind of film and I said, ‘Swell.’ And I really kind of wanted it to be like that just for that reason.”

For his part, Zemeckis was delighted that the film set in 1947 Los Angeles was being given its premiere at the legendary Radio City Art Deco palace.

“It felt like it’s where it belongs,” he said.

And what would Walt Disney have thought about the ambitious collaboration between the Walt Disney Co. and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment?

“I hate to second-guess Walt, you know,” said his nephew, Roy E. Disney, who helms the Disney animation studio. But, he said, “the essential idea behind it is a hell of a fun idea that I think anyone would have been delighted to do.”