For the first time ever, the greatest animated characters from major film studios came together as the cartoon cast of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of the wackiest, wildest, zippiest, and zaniest films ever to come from the Disney studio. Warner Bros.’ top hare Bugs Bunny shared a scene with Disney’s top mouse, Mickey, and when Daffy Duck plays dueling pianos with Donald Duck he vows, “This is the last time I work with someone with a th-peech impediment!” Other than its historic gathering of ink and painted personalities, Roger Rabbit featured the most innovative combination of animation and live action, taking home the Academy Awards® for Visual Effects, Film Editing, and Sound Editing. Richard Williams received a Special Achievement Award for “animation direction and creation of the cartoon characters.” Don Hahn produced the animation for the film and remembers the process of animating in a live action world, “(Director) Bob (Zemeckis) would cut an elaborate ‘invisible man’ movie so the actors were talking to the (later to be animated) rabbit in the chair. If the rabbit picks something up you’d have it on a rod with a puppeteer under the table and it would fly up in the air. Then you’d take out the rod. We’d have to animate over it, so that’s why you’d see that Roger’s hand would be in a really stiff position sometimes because we were drawing over the top of the rod. The ‘invisible man’ movie was cut and we did a turnover where we talked about what was in the scene. Then for each scene you’d get a stack of photostats made frame by frame of the material in that scene, and they’re all punched on the bottom and you put those on your pegs and then you draw into the scene. It was very inventive. I don’t think you’d ever do it the same way now, but in its day it was pretty great. The audience reaction was really amazing. People really were blown away.”
