Bob Hoskins's Toon Talents: Why the 'Roger Rabbit' Star Is Still Our Most Animated Actor
Bob Hoskins and his animated costar
Antonio Banderas just scored his biggest hit in years with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, which topped the box office in its opening weekend. Banderas plays the live-action villain who matches wits with the animated aquatic residents of Bikini Bottom. He’s only the latest flesh-and-blood actor to play second fiddle to a cartoon cast, joining Neil Patrick Harris (The Smurfs), Jason Lee (Alvin and the Chipmunks) and Brad Pitt (Cool World), among others. Indeed, when you count motion-capture-filled blockbusters like Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace and Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s clear that learning to act alongside animated personalities is one of the essentials in a modern movie star’s toolkit.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to experience a master class in this skill: Zip over to Netflix and watch the late Bob Hoskins in Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 classic, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A then-unprecedented fusion of live action and animation, the movie places Hoskins’s private eye Eddie Valiant in an alterna-world 1940s Los Angeles where toons and humans live side-by-side. Valiant is thrown into a murder mystery that involves the titular 2D rabbit, his bombshell wife Jessica, and an all-star supporting cast of animated icons from Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse to Betty Boop and Droopy the Dog. The level of realism Hoskins brings to his performance is the reason audiences buy the movie’s parallel universe, and his work remains the gold standard for any actor sharing the screen with costars who aren’t really there.
Making Roger Rabbit was an experience that took its toll on the late actor, who retired from the screen in 2012 and passed away in 2014. “I had to learn to hallucinate to do it,” he remarked in a 1988 TV interview. “After doing it for six months, for sixteen hours a day, I lost control of it and sort of had weasels and rabbits popping out of the wall at me.” The BAFTA Awards caught heat this weekend for neglecting Hoskins in their “in memoriam” segment, so we thought we’d pay our own tribute to Hoskins’s understated genius with these five glorious GIFs.
Prelude to a Kiss
While some sequences simply required Hoskins to appear alongside animated characters, his interactions with Roger always got very physical. Whether he was hoisting Roger up by his bunny ears or getting smacked on the lips, Hoskins had to keep his scene-mate’s size and weight consistent. “When he picks the rabbit up, you can feel 60 pounds of weight in his hand, even though there’s nothing there,” marvels supervising animator Simon Wells in the making-of featurette, Behind the Ears. “There’s never any doubt that he’s got that rabbit right there in his hand.”
Speed Demon
Car chases are hard enough to shoot without a driver having to pilot a vehicle that has a mind of its own. Brash taxicab Benny keeps Hoskins on the go with lots of bad jokes and fancy gadgets as he and Roger attempt to outrace Judge Doom’s weasel gang. We doubt Dominic Toretto could’ve handled this ride as well.
Siren Song
Those of us in the theater have the benefit of being able to see Jessica Rabbit as she croons her torch song. But Hoskins had to manufacture his gobsmacked expression, taking in the (very) full figure of a woman who wasn’t there. Kathleen Turner, who voiced Jessica, got an early look at how Hoskins was faring. “They kept sending me tapes of how it was going along,” she told The A.V. Club in 2012. “They were shooting a scene with Bob Hoskins, and this sort of metal frame that was Jessica that would be drawn over in later stages in the process.”
Out With the Trash
Perhaps as payback for Hoskins tossing Roger around throughout the movie, the actor himself gets airborne for an early scene where the Ink and Paint Club’s gorilla bouncer physically ejects him from the premises. Being the throwee rather than the thrower, had to have been a technical challenge for both him and the rest of the production team. But the sheer terror on Hoskins’s face sells the moment and distracts from any special-effects trickery.
Tooning Out
Hoskins must have felt like he had hit a whole other level of insanity when his character left ordinary L.A. behind to enter Toon Town, the domain of practically every cartoon character ever drawn. As Zemeckis himself put it in the 1988 TV special, Roger Rabbit and the Secrets of Toon Town, “Ever had your head stuck in a pinball machine? I guess that would be the best description of what it’s like to go into Toon Town.” In this behind-the-scenes before-and-after clip you can see the blue-screen intensive process that allowed Hoskins to imagine plunging from a cartoon skyscraper.
Image credit: Everett
