Cartoon Shorts Are Hopping

Roger Rabbit is back in the theaters--and so are short cartoons. Walt Disney Pictures and Amblin Entertainment are following up the success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” with a series of shorts starring the zany bunny.

“I don’t think Disney has created a character of the magnitude of Roger in the last 30 years--a character that the public perceives as being unique, the way Mickey Mouse is unique, who jumps off the screen into people’s laps,” said Peter Schneider, Disney’s senior vice president, feature animation. “Yes, we’re considering a sequel to the feature, but we’re also doing the short cartoons. What better way to keep the character alive than using him correctly?”

The presence of the first installment in the series, “Tummy Trouble,” a fast-paced, funny tribute to Hollywood cartoons of the ‘40s, on a de-facto double bill with “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” has helped the latter gross more than $87 million at the box office in five weeks.

“ ‘Honey’ is a very strong, successful movie in its own right,” said Schneider, “but its entertainment value is enhanced by the cartoon. ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ was hailed as a masterpiece of technique, animation and concept; when you follow that kind of success, it’s very easy to trip and fall. We were committed to doing something at the same level of quality as the feature. I feel we were successful, and I’m pleased by the film’s success.”

A second Roger cartoon, “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” is already in the works at the new Disney studio in Orlando, Fla. Schneider expects the series will run to three or four films, but no release dates have been set for the others.

Meanwhile, the artists are enjoying the success of the first theatrical animated short Disney has released in 25 years. Although his studio’s reputation was built on the success of the “Silly Symphonies” and Mickey Mouse cartoons, rising production costs forced Walt Disney to phase out shorts during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. (Warner Bros., which eliminated theatrical cartoon production in 1969, recently made two shorts starring Daffy Duck, “The Duxorcist” (1987) and “Night of the Living Duck” (1988). They received widespread media attention but only limited release.)

“It’s great to see the short doing so well, as the production was exhausting and exhilarating,” said Don Hahn, associate producer of “Roger Rabbit” and producer of “Tummy Trouble.”

“The opening cartoon in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ is Dick Williams’ masterpiece, so to match it we had to rise to the occasion, and that included everyone on the crew, from the director to the ink-and-paint people.”

Some of the studio’s better young animators were given the challenge of reviving the short cartoon and duplicating the look of the hit comedy with a fraction of the time and budget alloted to the film. Although Disney declines to release exact figures, “Roger Rabbit” took four years to make and cost approximately $45 million; “Tummy Trouble” was made in four months on a budget industry sources estimate at about $1.5 million.

“Trying to make a short cartoon like the ones we grew up watching was a thrill--and an enormous challenge,” said director Rob Minkoff. “We were aware that the whole animation industry was watching to see how it came out. The feeling that so much was riding on our work created a tremendous pressure.”

“What’s Cookin’,” the cartoon that opened “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was modeled after the great postwar MGM and Warner Bros. shorts that featured such well-known characters as Tom and Jerry, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and Sylvester and Tweety. But the feature only included the first half of “What’s Cookin’ ”; the artists had to figure out what would constitute a Roger Rabbit-Baby Herman cartoon, and how one would end.

“We really had a twofold job to do,” said Tom Sito, who animated the weasels in the feature and the flying needles sequence in the short. “We wanted to show the audience that it was the same old Roger they enjoyed in the first film, with no compromise in quality or taste, but we also wanted to delve into his character more deeply.”

Sito and the other artists who had worked on “Roger Rabbit” discovered that although the short involved the same characters, it presented new problems and possibilities.

“On the feature, the live action had been shot before we began the animation, which presented unique demands of staging and timing,” Sito said. “If Eddy Valiant hit a weasel and the weasel fell and hit a table, Bob Hoskins would do the gesture and the prop table would collapse. We had to match our animation to those actions and try to make the scene look spontaneous. On the short, we didn’t have those restrictions, so it was more open in terms of your ability to create jokes and play with the timing.”

Most of the jokes the animators devised were wild, slapstick gags that stretched Roger’s body like so much Silly Putty. Minkoff said his two guiding principles were “keep him up in the air” and “take Tex Avery’s style to the nth degree.”

Although Minkoff is directing “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” the subsequent Roger films will be made a different crew. Hahn and Sito are preparing to go to London for preliminary work on “Beauty and the Beast,” a feature-length adaptation of the Perrault fairy tale slated for 1991.

“I’d like to work on the other cartoons,” Sito said. “Roger Rabbit is such a fun character to throw around and do things with. When animators get a good character, they act like parking-lot attendants when they get a hold of a Porsche.”