It used to be that Saturday matinees offered dessert before dinner, a nifty Hollywood cartoon or three before the feature film. Daffy Duck would fume, but gracefully, through some dethpickable humiliation. Droopy dog would corral a wolf felon by employing the emotional minimalism of a Buster Keaton on Quaaludes. Maybe there'd be an early Disney cartoon for more refined preteen appetites. And then, on with the main attraction! The feature was often a broken-down B-minus monster movie, and pretty much an aesthetic anticlimax after the seven-minute masterpieces that opened the show. At the time, of course, nobody figured to hang cartoons in a museum. Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the Disney elves were considered ghetto artisans then, not the Leonardos of cinema comedy. But even a ten-year-old moviegoer knew that these guys, on the screen and behind the scenes, were a hard act to follow.
In this elaborate new blend of animation and live action co-produced by Disney and Steven Spielberg, the "cartoon before the movie" is how the movie begins. As you settle into your seat, the Maroon cartoon studio logo flares onto the screen, announcing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, starring Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit. For a few minutes of inventive mayhem, the infant crawls toward every lethal kitchen appliance while his harried hare of a baby-sitter works frantically to keep things from blowing up. It's the comedy of anticipated disaster -- the nightmare anxiety that propelled so many of Avery's slapstick tragedies -- and it works just fine. Too fine: the opening cartoon upstages the movie that emerges from it.
It is the film's nice conceit that Roger, Baby Herman and all the other characters from '40s Hollywood animation are creatures of a subhuman species known as Toons. They breathe, they emote, and sometimes they get cuckolded by their sultry wives. Jessica Rabbit, Roger's spouse, is one such bimbette. "I'm not bad," Jessica pouts, "I'm just drawn that way." But all Toontown knows she's been spending time with Marvin Acme, who owns the local gagworks. So when Marvin gets bumped off, Roger is the prime suspect. His only hope is Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a human detective who has been burned out and bitter ever since a Toon killed his brother by dropping a piano on the poor sib's head.
Roger Rabbit careers like a Toontown trolley and boasts a technical dexterity that Walt Disney could only have daydreamed of. At first you may snap to suspicious attention when, say, a cartoon stork pedals a real bicycle, or Jessica diddles a human's necktie. But the film encourages you to vacation in its ingenuity. Drop by the Ink and Paint Club, Toontown's toniest dive, where the password is "Walt sent me," penguin waiters patrol in tuxedos, and Daffy and Donald Duck, together for the first time, perform a piano duet. Meet old friends like Mickey and Bugs, Tweety and Betty Boop, and new ones, like the '80s version of Snow White's dwarfs: Greasy, Wheezy, Smart Ass, Psycho and Stupid. Once the plot gets rolling, and Hoskins is handcuffed to his fugitive client, you may forget that Roger was drawn onto the scene long after it was shot.