At long last, The Chosen One has been discovered. Working as a cashier. With no interest in doing anything even slightly more difficult.
yeah because there is nothing more difficult than retail
tbh anyone who works/has worked retail would see the chance to go around saving the world in ways that could potentially kill them as a welcome vacation
“Does the position of Chosen One offer health benefits of any kind?”
“Well, our ragtag gang of world-saving underdogs has a doctor on-team.”
“Do I have to pay her out of pocket, is what I’m asking.”
“Gosh no! She’s an idealist, you don’t pay her at all!”
“Oh! That’s nice. But then I guess there’s no paycheck.”
“I mean, the secret cabal that dispenses our orders does make sure we have enough money to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our secret lair and such.”
“Hourly?”
“Hourly what?”
“Like have you guys ever had to punch a time clock?”
“We once had to dismantle a sinister time-freezing device in the shape of a clock….otherwise no.”
I feel like there are probably too many people just scrolling past this so let’s go through everything that’s going on here.
1. With Roger’s voice actor standing off camera, Bob Hoskins acts into empty air and frantically sawing at his handcuff, continually looking up and down at different visual marks of various depths. Look at the slow pan up of his eyes in gif 4, and then the quick shift to his side. Think about how, on set, he was looking at nothing.
2. Starting in gif 2, The box must be made to stop shaking, either by concealed crew member, mechanism, or Hoskins own dextrousness, as he is doing all of the things mentioned in point 1.
3. In all gifs, Roger’s handcuff has to be made to move appropriately through a hidden mechanism. (If you watch the 4th gif closely you can see the split second where it is replaced by an animated facsimile of the actual handcuff, but just for barely a second.)
4. The crew voluntarily (we know this because it is now a common internal phrase at Disney for putting in extra work for small but significant reward) decided to make Roger bump the lamp and give the entire scene a constantly moving light source that had to be matched between the on set footage and Roger. This was for two reasons, A) Robert Zemeckis thought it would be funnier, and B) one of the key techniques the crew employed to make the audience instinctually accept that Toons coexisted with the live action environment was constant interaction with it. This is why, other than comedy, Roger is so dang clumsy. Instead of isolating Toons from real objects to make it easier for themselves, the production went out of its way to make Toons interact more with the live action set than even real actors necessarily would, in order to subtly, constantly remind the audience that they have real palpable presence. You can watch the whole scene here, just to see how few shots there are of Roger where he doesn’t interact with a real object.
The crew and animators did all of this with hand drawn cell animation without computerized special effects. 1988, we were still five years out from Jurassic Park, the first movie to make the leap from fully physical creature effects to seamlessly integrating realistic computer generated images with live action footage. Roger’s shadows weren’t done with CGI. Hoskin’s sightlines were not digitally altered. Wires controlling the handcuff were not removed in post.
Who fucking Framed Roger fucking Rabbit, folks. The greatest trick is when people don’t realize you’re tricking them at all.
Let’s also not forget that writing. “Only when it was funny” isn’t just hilarious, it’s great comedy theory. It lampshades the joke, but also serves to remind the viewer that Toons have a separate set of physical laws they adhere to, mostly revolving around comedic value. Roger cannot remove his hand from the cuffs… until it’d get a laugh from an audience.
Everything about this movie, EVERYTHING about it, is so finely crafted. I could wax lyrical about it for days.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my all-time favorite movies. Hands down.
On the surface level, it’s amazing. I saw it as a kid in the theater, and was blown away. It was hilarious, it was scary. It was a love letter to the era of cartooning and noir crime stories. It did what many considered a “never in a million years” scenario: Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, the bajillion-dollar symbols of rivals WB and Disney’s cartoon empires, sharing the screen together in cooperation. Think of the “holy shit” factor when the latest Smash Bros game reveals a major non-Nintendo character is in it, multiplied by about a billion because this shit never happened back then. This may not have been the first improbable cinematic crossover, but damn if it wasn’t one of the biggest, if not THE biggest.
(Plus of course Daffy and Donald Duck’s amazing piano duel, and closing the film with both Porky Pig and Tinkerbell in their famous signoffs.)
It was a technical marvel, making you forget the sheer amount of work that had to go into integrating the toons into the film. For the technology of the time, even when there’s rough-around-the-edges bits, it’s an amazing accomplishment in practical effects and hand-drawn animation that I appreciate more and more.
If you haven’t seen it, please, do so. If it’s been a while… see it again.
Let’s also not forget its integration of the real-world Los Angeles history of freeway-building and the disruption of minority communities. This shit is DEEP.
writer: this is one of my male characters! he cares about his guy friends and loves them deeply.
tumblr: oh! so he’s gay!
writer: uh…no, he’s attracted to women.
tumblr: ….so he’s bi!
writer: uhh…no…….he loves his guy friends but he’s not romantically/sexually attracted to them.
tumblr: ….so you’re homophobic.
writer:
Healthy male friendships are almost as rare in mainstream fiction as gay male relationships, and maybe more rare in fanfiction. Let men be wonderful friends without pushing a romantic relationship, just like men and women should be able to be wonderful friends without the pressure of a romantic relationship.
*AGGRESSIVELY SLAMS REBLOG UNTIL I DIE*
This is literally the reason men are so terrified of being open about loving each other platonically, because they don’t want people to assume they’re gay just because they can be supportive of their fucking friends
YES THANK YOU I 1000% AGREE WITH THIS
Oh my I was just thinking this. Not everything has to gay tumblr I swear to god I can go on a whole rant about this but this isn’t my post.
How come there are so few magical birth control options in fantasy settings?
There is Jewelry Of Contraception, Miscarriage Hex, and Abortion Potion, and that’s it.
But come on, guys, it’s magic. Those are both things we can accomplish in the real world with science.
Why not “as long as this knot remains tied, your pregnancy will not progress any further. The embryo is fine, just frozen in time until you’re ready to become a parent!”
Or “I have turned the baby into a berry. get the father of the baby to eat it, and it’s his problem now”
Or “I’ve hexed your gonads, you won’t have any kids at all ever until you do a favor for a witch, preferably me”
Or “lol, I stole your dick in the middle of the night and put it on my tree with all the other dicks in the village”
Come on, guys, get creative!
man, I was thinking too small. it’s MAGIC, guys
“I have put the baby inside this seed. when you plant the seed, a flower will grow, and your baby will be inside it. your baby might be the size of a mouse, or uh look like a mouse, but hey, we can’t have everything. it can still talk and wear clothes, and those are the important things, right? it’ll save you a ton of cloth over the years, trust me”
“I have sent the baby into the future. the NEXT time either of you has a kid, it will be this baby, regardless of who you have it with. this baby will always be top of the queue until one of you lets it be born.”
“I took your womb, and put it in an eggshell in a duck in a chest in a tree guarded by a dragon at the end of the world. so the next time you get pregnant, it will definitely be on purpose.”
“I turned the baby into a cat. everyone likes kittens, right?”
“the baby isn’t “dead” so much as “turned back into an egg and a splash of jizz.” magic is cool, isn’t it?”
“you will only ever be fertile immediately after you eat turnips. and by immediately, I mean, put a turnip on the nightstand, if you catch my drift.”
“I have donated your fetus to the fetus lottery that witches draw from for infertile couples. it’s, uh, currently in this cauldron. yes this looks like leek and potato soup, but trust me, it’s a fertility potion.”
“here is your baby. a stick. I definitely turned a real human child into a stick, and didn’t give it to the fairies. this stick is for you to keep.”
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