Who Framed Roger Rabbit

About Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 live-action/animated film produced by Amblin Entertainment and The Walt Disney Company (released under its Touchstone Pictures banner) which blends traditional animation and live action. Based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, as adapted by screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, the film is set in a fictionalized version of 1947 Los Angeles, where animated characters (always referred to as "toons") are real beings who live and work alongside humans in the real world, most of them as actors in animated cartoons. The film stars Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Stubby Kaye and the voices of Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner. The music was composed by perennial Zemeckis film composer Alan Silvestri and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

At $70 million USD, Roger Rabbit was one of the most expensive films to date at the time of its release.[citation needed] The film earned over $150 million in North America alone during its original theatrical release. The film is notable for featuring characters from several competing animation studios in a single film, and for being one of the last film roles for Golden Age voice artists Mel Blanc and Mae Questel. Various of the film's artists and technicians won four Oscars at the 61st Academy Awards ceremony in 1989.

The movie opens as production of a Baby Herman short subject – which in the realm of this film is "live action" slapstick – ends when Roger Rabbit blows his lines for the 23rd time. Roger plays the supporting comic foil to cartoon star Baby Herman (a baby physically but chronologically a cantankerous 50 year old man). In the movie's milieu (taken place in 1947), cartoon characters are a sapient species cohabiting alongside human beings, though unlike them, "Toons," as they are called, are not bound by the laws of physics. A section of Los Angeles has been designated as "Toontown" and is inhabited exclusively by the Toons.