ATTRACTION REVIEW : Disney Spins a Car Toon Tale

“Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin,” a new ride that opened Wednesday at Disneyland, uses black lights, strobe lights, three-dimensional “audio-animatronic” figures, cut-outs, mirrors, sound effects and music to evoke detective Eddie Valiant’s madcap visit to Toontown in the 1988 hit movie, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Entering through a “backstage” area that recalls the Maroon Cartoon Studio, visitors walk past dressing rooms for Jessica Rabbit and Baby Herman. Bongo, the gorilla-bouncer, scowls through the peephole in the door of the Ink and Paint Club. (He doesn’t respond to “Walt sent me,” the password in the film.)

The ride actually begins when visitors board a small version of Benny the Cab for a three-minute, 20-second sound-and-light show that suggests a noisier version of Alice in Wonderland or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Fantasyland.

The bright yellow cars chase one another through a series of cartoon scenes that include a mad scientist’s lab and a china shop, complete with bull. Entering a chamber filled with angular graphics that simulate a cartoon “explosion” feels a bit like driving into a Roy Lichtenstein painting; it’s followed by the requisite stars and little birds.

Passengers try to keep their cab facing in the direction they’re heading by spinning the steering wheel (it’s tougher than it sounds) as they bounce and jerk along, avoiding weasels armed with barrels of the deadly Dip that terrifies Toons. (A sign lists the formula as equal parts of benzine, turpentine and acetone.)

Roger Rabbit finally comes to the rescue with a portable hole, a gag borrowed from the Robert McKimson short “The Whole Idea” (Warner Bros., 1955).

It’s a fast and funny trip, but it doesn’t really capture the look of Toontown. The sequence in the film re-created the rubbery elan of the Fleischer, MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons of the early ‘30s.

The characters (and, often, the backgrounds) in those shorts were drawn with a rambunctious elasticity: Noses and limbs could be stretched at will; faces appeared on inanimate objects, and characters casually metamorphosed. Anything could and did happen in those surreal films.

The brightly colored, jointed figures in “Car Toon Spin” suggest the elegant animation of the Disney features on other rides, but Toontown should feel like it’s made out of Silly Putty, rather than wood and concrete.

This caveat aside--and the proviso that small children may find the experience a little too noisy and frenetic--anyone 5 or older will probably enjoy “Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin.”

* General admission to Disneyland is $24 to $30; $22 for Southern California residents (through June). (714) 999-4565.