Director: Robert Zemeckis
Cast: Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Charles Fleischer, Stubby Kaye
Have I Seen it Before: I’m a child of the 1990s and I had a VCR. What do you think?
Did I Like It: One would naturally want to dwell in this review on the technology on display here. Animated characters had interacted with live action performances before, in films like Song of the South (1946) and Mary Poppins (1964) (both from Disney, incidentally). However, they never interacted quite so believably before or since. Animated characters rustle through their environment. Water splashes, blinds rustle, and chairs rotate when they come in contact with Roger and company. It’s a subtle, relatively low-tech addition to the process, but adds so much.
This is also a baffling cross-corporation crossover. When would you ever see Donald and Daffy Duck play a duet on the piano? Or Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny engage in conversation? Or any character owned by Warner Bros. appearing within 100 miles of a Disney production? It’s a testament to the baffling things Steven Spielberg could get done with just the weight of his mere involvement in a movie. I can’t imagine that such a convergence could ever happen again. It’s probably for the best that any sequel—variously rumored to be a war movie, or a domestic drama with Roger (Fleischer) and Jessica (various performers depending on the context, but primarily Kathleen Turner) in the 1950s—never came together.
Other movies attempted to fit a similar mold in the ensuing years. Cool World (1992), Space Jam (1996), and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) all tried to merge real people and cartoon characters to varying degrees of commercial and critical success. Why do those films disappear into ambivalence and this film stands the test of time? Honestly, the story that underlines the whole thing (a tale about a private eye uncovering a plot to eradicate LA’s public transit system in favor of the freeway that will inevitably take it over) actually works under its own merits. The character work is solid. It may all be in the mold of Chinatown (1974), but it doesn’t skimp in the craft department simply because it is an homage.