Jeremy’s Tophunder №54: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

8 min readJun 8, 2020

The character of Eddie Valiant went through a rather strange casting process. The movie was directed by Robert Zemeckis, but was produced by Amblin Entertainment, Stephen Spielberg’s production company, and Spielberg maintained a lot of creative control.

Spielberg’s first choice was Harrison Ford. Naturally. During pre-production, however, the movie was on pace to be the most expensive movie ever made. It eventually did end up setting the record, with a budget of more than $58 million, which seems almost quaint given the budget of most modern blockbusters, but this was a huge deal back in the late 80s. With a budget already so high, the studio (Disney) didn’t want to shell out even more money for an A-List star if they didn’t have to. So when Ford wouldn’t drop his asking price, and Disney wouldn’t increase their offer, they moved onto their next option: Bill Murray.

For those of you who don’t know how Murray chooses which movies to do, here’s a brief summary: He doesn’t have an agent or a manager. If you have a personal relationship with him, you can just call him up and offer him a part. But if you don’t, it’s near-impossible. He apparently has a P.O. Box somewhere, that he checks about once a year, and he has a voice-mail service where you can leave him a message pitching your idea. Granted, for both of those options, you need to know which P.O. Box to mail your stuff to and what phone number to call, and neither of those things are exactly public knowledge. For Who Framed Roger Rabbit, somehow Spielberg and Zemeckis couldn’t get in touch with him, so they moved on.

Eddie Murphy turned down the role because he didn’t quite understand the concept of live action blending with animation — he later called it one of the biggest regrets of his career. Other actors that were considered included Robin Williams, Chevy Chase, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, and Sylvester Stallone. It’s unclear if any of those actors were ever officially offered the role, but it’s a quite impressive list.

So they settled on Bob Hoskins.

Wait, what?

Yup, they went with an actor who was best known for his work in crime dramas to be the lead actor in an animated comedy. I suppose it made some sense, as Who Framed Roger Rabbit certainly has some film noir elements to it, and it’s not like Hoskins was unknown at the time — he was only two years removed from an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. But I certainly wouldn’t say that Hoskins was a no-brainer choice for the role.

And you know what? I love it. I think it works perfectly. The character is set up to be an alcoholic curmudgeon, which clearly plays to Hoskins’ strengths. For the most part, the humans in the movie are the straight-men, while the toons are (predictably) ridiculous. At this point, I have a really hard time imagining a true comedic actor in the role. I think the movie would have ended up going in a different direction that I’m not sure makes it better. I don’t think the movie needed a star, I think it needed a character actor, which is exactly what it got. Of the stars whose names were bandied about, the only one I think that would have been an improvement on the movie we got is Jack Nicholson. He’s the only one I can really buy as a down-on-his-luck private detective in the 40s. Valiant is one of the few human characters of any real consequence in the movie — if the tone is off even a little, it will be noticeable. Hoskins nailed the role, and the movie works.

My favorite part of the movie is Christopher Lloyd’s character, Judge Doom. He was the source of many nightmares for me growing up — just a supremely creepy character with nefarious motives and unblinking eyes. If you plan on re-watching the movie (it’s on Disney+), make sure to watch for that — Lloyd never blinks his eyes while he’s on camera. It was very much intentional. It terrified me as a kid. Luckily, I’m no longer a kid and can appreciate how awesome Christopher Lloyd is as a bad guy.

The part of Judge Doom was originally offered to Tim Curry, but Zemeckis and Spielberg deemed him “too terrifying” for a movie that would be in large part geared towards kids and families. Reading about that this week made me want to see that version of the movie. For as awesome as Christopher Lloyd is (and he is awesome — I think it’s the best performance of his career), I really want to see what the filmmakers deemed “too terrifying.” I mean, we’ve seen what Tim Curry is capable of in Clue and Muppet Treasure Island and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I want to see him here, and I’m a little disappointed that we don’t get to.

The real winner of the movie, though, was animation. Following the deaths of Walt and Roy Disney in the 60s and 70s, mainstream animation really cratered. For a 17-year period between 1971 (Roy Disney’s death) and 1988 (the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit), there were only six Disney animated features released (compared to, for example, the 19 that were released between 1937–1954, or the seemingly hundreds of animated movies released since 1988). Those six certainly had some hits, including Robin Hood, The Fox and the Hound, The Great Mouse Detective, but animation just wasn’t capturing the public’s interest as much as it did in the 40s and 50s. More than that, Disney’s movies were being out-performed by the animated works of competing studios. Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment put out An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go To Heaven, and for those of you really into animation, this was also a particularly high point for Anime — Akira and My Neighbor Totoro were both released in 1988, and Castle in the Sky was from 1986. Disney, to their credit, saw the writing on the wall, and teamed up with Spielberg and Amblin to produce the most ambitious animated movie in history. And it worked.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit shifted the momentum squarely back in Disney’s favor. It was a throwback to the golden age of American animation, and when it became a blockbuster hit (grossing $330 million against a $58 million budget), Disney quickly shifted their focus back to pumping out high-quality animated features as often as possible, which led to the following run between 1989 and 1999 (with grades assigned by me):

The Little Mermaid (A-), Rescuers Down Under (C+), Beauty and the Beast (A+), Aladdin (A+), The Lion King (A+), Pocahontas (B+), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (B), Hercules (B+), Mulan (A), Tarzan (B)

There’s really only one dud in the group, and several of them could potentially be considered the greatest animated movie ever through the point in time they were released (and three of them appear on the Tophunder list of your’s truly). Based on how long it takes to make an animated feature, we can tell that Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were probably already in production before Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released. But even in cursory research of both movies, it’s apparent that Disney allowed for those movies to become more expensive, more expansive, and more ambitious in the wake of Roger Rabbit’s success. It’s possible that those movies would have been just as good without the extra support, but it still has to be mentioned.

The Disney Renaissance of the late 80s and 90s almost overshadows the massive success that Roger Rabbit was. It appeared on 43 Top 10 lists among national film critics (third most of any movie that year), and it won three Oscars, as well as a special achievement award for its blending of animation and live action. It was the second highest-grossing movie of the year, and was the highest-grossing animated movie of all time until it was eclipsed a few years later by Beauty and the Beast. It was one of my personal favorites as a kid, but as I fell out of love with animation, it just didn’t hit me quite the same way anymore. I re-discovered it in my college years, around the same time that Pixar was crushing it every time (Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 in four consecutive years) and I was starting to re-discover how awesome animation could be. Since then, it’s always been among my favorite animated movies. It was included on every single draft of this list, but never really wavered in its position — it was always around the middle. For a movie that has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, that kind of makes sense. I know what it is, I know exactly what I love about it, and I know what type of mood it will put me in. It’s the oldest animated movie on my list, and it clocks in at №54

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige