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"You mean you could have taken your hand out of that handcuff at any time?" an incredulous Eddie asks Roger after the rabbit slips his shackles. "Not at any time," comes the retort. "Only when it was funny." Such are the Toontown laws of physics; they do not always apply to this movie. Every framed frame is beguiling, as befits a pioneering project made by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) and ace Animator Richard Williams. But not all the gags -- even those quoted from such Bugs Bunny classics as Falling Hare and Rabbit Seasoning -- have the limber wit of the cartoons that inspired them. Nor do the human actors add much. Hoskins, in a role for which Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray were considered, lacks their effortless star quality. He's more like an armor-plated Yosemite Sam, gruff and explodable. Only Christopher Lloyd, as the evil Judge Doom with a scheme even more nefarious than the one hatched by the burghers of Chinatown, easily straddles the film's two worlds.
Working in anonymity, the old masters of animation were free to wreak fertile anarchy. Today those cartoons are deemed big art, and Roger Rabbit is big business. The film cost about a zillion simoleons (well, $35 million) and carries a humongous 739 names on the credits (not including Kathleen Turner, who lends her voice to Jessica). Something got lost in the move from storyboard to screen, and in the stretch from seven minutes to 103. From sad experience, Disney and Spielberg should know the perils of paying huge homage to modest genres, yet Roger Rabbit has the odor of a Toontown Tron, a 1941 for 1988. Zemeckis deserves credit for his will and wit, but he must have been handcuffed by the size of both the film and his ambitions for it. And, unlike the cartoon Roger Rabbit, this gifted director couldn't get out. Even when it wasn't funny.