Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Robert Zemeckis’s 104 minute film is set in Los Angeles in 1947. Judge Doom means to erase Toontown with a chemical that dissolves cartoon characters, put a freeway there and shut the rail line down, echoing the real dismantling of the city’s Pacific Electric system. Not one frame was composited digitally. ILM optical photography supervisor Ed Jones says flatly there was none, and the job ran through seven optical printers and more than a thousand shots. Its method, two and a half D, layered shadow and highlight passes over the drawings from a palette of roughly 350 colours. Jessica’s dress alone could take thirty film elements in one shot. Disney wanted the camera locked off; Zemeckis refused. Life size rubber puppets stood on set to fix the actors’ eyelines while puppeteers lay beneath the stage moving trays. The animation was made in London by Richard Williams’s unit. It won Oscars for Film Editing, Sound Effects Editing and Visual Effects, and Williams took a separate Special Achievement Award for animation direction. Its cinematography, art direction and sound nominations lost. A good fit if you like checking whether each drawn shadow matches the real light in the room. Not for small children: Disney judged the picture too adult for its own brand and released it through Touchstone.