Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: Long overdue, Zemeckis’ ‘Rabbit’ tests well on DVD

Friday, March 21, 2003 | 8:29 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" finally gets the premium DVD treatment (Touchstone Home Entertainment, $29.99) this coming week, and I strongly recommend you snap up a copy, or two, or 10.

Like every other studio in Hollywood, Disney has its doubts as to whether consumers actually care about value-added content on DVDs. High sales for "Roger Rabbit" would send a strong message to the industry.

And besides, it's a fantastic set -- another pair of reference-quality DVDs from Disney, whose "Fantasia" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" sets could be used in classrooms to teach animation, storytelling and basic filmmaking. "Roger Rabbit" is an under-appreciated event film, and with the behind-the-scenes information and context provided by this very collectable set, it should finally get its due.

Released in 1988, just as the Walt Disney Company was regaining its artistic and commercial footing after a decades-long slump, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was a box-office sensation, but not the sensation it should have been.

After all, the film was a first in several regards: the first time animation had been seamlessly blended with fluid live-action camera, the first time Disney and Warner Bros. characters had worked together, and the first time in years a movie had been prefaced by a cartoon.

And what a cartoon it is. The Chuck Jones-like chaos that opens "Roger Rabbit," animated by Richard Williams, remains one of the flat-out funniest pieces of film you'll ever see.

In just three minutes, Roger Rabbit cooks in a "Hotternell" oven, swallows an ironing board and takes a faceful of refrigerator in a desperate effort to save Baby Herman from himself. Suffering has never been this much fun.

The energy level remains constant in the "Chinatown"-like crime drama that follows, directed by Robert Zemeckis. The novelty of cartoon characters working and living in the physical world would have been enough to draw crowds to theaters, but the filmmakers gave the film a terrific twist: the "Toons" are treated as a racial minority. That tension between the worlds humanizes the cartoons as well as the humans, and lifted "Roger Rabbit" above gimmick.

Of course, it's possible to watch the disc and not think about this stuff, and Disney makes it easy to do: the first disc, subtitled "Family Friendly," features the film in full-screen format, three Roger Rabbit cartoons, and a G-rated documentary, "Who Made Roger Rabbit."

You can let the kids watch this version, and after they've gone to bed, you can pop in the second disc, where all the real fun happens.

Subtitled "Enthusiast," Disc Two has a letterboxed version of the film, a series of well-made documentaries that explore the visual effects that earned the film four Oscars, and a commentary track by Zemeckis, producer Frank Marshall, the screenwriters and some of the visual effects team.

From these, you'll learn where the "Chinatown" influence came from, how the sexy Jessica Rabbit came to be, what made star Bob Hoskins suffer hallucinations and why the title omits a question mark.

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a must-own, not just for animation fans, but for anyone who simply loves the language of film.

Disney, executive producer Steven Spielberg and directors Zemeckis and Williams expanded the encyclopedia by a full volume with "Roger," and everyone from Daffy Duck to Jar-Jar Binks should get a copy of the DVD and pay their respects to the rabbit who kept them living and working in our world.