Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, Comedy
• Release Date: 1988-06-22 Nationwide
• Running Time: 103 min.
• Director: Robert Zemeckis
• Cast: Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer, Stubby Kaye
• Producer: Robert Watts, Frank Marshall
• Writer: Jeffrey Price, Peter S Seaman
• Distributor: Buena Vista Distribution Compa
• Official Site: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Official Site

The most commercially successful living filmmaker, Steven Spielberg is also the movies' greatest conduit to the American collective subconscious. Spielberg executive-produced (and spiritually godfathered) this 1988 blockbuster, in which a sodden private eye (Bob Hoskins) finds the dark secrets of postwar L.A. hidden in Toontown, a utopia populated by cartoon characters. Roger Rabbit is among the most delirious, and most innocent, political allegories in all of cinema: It's like a G-rated parody of James Ellroy's pulp novels about the LAPD's war on the city's black and Chicano underclass. More academic folk than me might even say that the movie's mix of live-action and animated worlds is a huge pun on miscegenation, and that the pneumatic Jessica Rabbit is the cinema's ultimate tragic mulatto. Subversive or reactionary? You be the judge, but one thing is clear: Spielberg's Holocaust anxieties never had a more profane expression. Five years later, the master reworked Roger Rabbit's ending, in which grateful Toons thank Hoskins's private dick for saving them from extermination--only this time, he called it Schindler's List. (Matthew Wilder)