Hi Folks,

I know this is post 1970 animation, but it strives to look like classic animation so I hope I'm not out of line posting this here.

Purchasing and watching the new Tex Avery blu ray inspired me to re-watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In doing so I find myself sort of disappointed in the animation, in the sense that the animated characters seem to constantly squash and stretch even when they aren't supposed to. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of solidity of the characters. Am I the only one who notices this or feels this way? For the record I still find the SFX work on the movie incredible, the blending of live action and animation and the interaction between the two is terrific, and I really like the character design. I just wish the animated characters were a animated a bit more solidly.

The follow up Roger Rabbit shorts are much, much better in this regard. If it wasn't for the occasional computer animation in a couple of the shorts, these cartoons look like they could have been Tex Avery cartoons.

Mike

What about Jim Tyler's animation? He did squash and stretch a lot in the New York toons.

Tyer, you mean. His animation was something else altogether.

Richard Williams was emphatically *not* a fan of the “cartoony”, squashy-stretchy animation that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was supposed to celebrate...which I think sums up why the animation in that film is more like a caricature of 40s animation than the real deal. As with the many other projects he took on over the years, he did it to boost his profile and move The Thief and the Cobbler along.

It seems there were quite a few major figures who didn’t like how Williams handled the animation in Roger Rabbit either. Towards the end of his Animator’s Survival Kit, Williams actually reprints a phone conversation he had with Frank Thomas (!) in which Thomas was, ahem, not willing to praise Williams’s work on the film.

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