With the obvious exception of “Back to the Future,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” is probably Robert Zemeckis’ best film: funny, dark and burning with a love of animation. Ever since its release, rumors have flown about a sequel — writer Nat Maudlin wrote a script called “Roger Rabbit: The Toon Patrol,” a prequel that followed the Charles Fleischer-voiced bunny’s rise to fame, including a stint fighting in World War Two. By all accounts, it was an excellent script, but Zemeckis was never involved, and it never made it out of development.
Recent rumors have suggested that Zemeckis is interested in returning to Roger Rabbit, though, with a number of reports coming out of Comic-Con suggesting it was possible, and now Zemeckis has confirmed the news to MTV, while doing the press rounds to plug his imminent “A Christmas Carol.” He tells them that original writers Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, who were also behind “Shrek the Third” and Ron Howard’s “The Grinch,” are returning, and are currently penning a draft for the sequel.
Of course, the big question is to what extent Zemeckis plans to use his beloved motion-capture technology for this project. Will the animated characters be brought into three dimensions? Will the likes of the dead-eyed Tom Hanks Santa from “The Polar Express” and creepy old Jim Carrey as Scrooge appear alongside the likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck? Zemeckis told the ComicCon crowd earlier this year, “The 2D characters from the original will remain 2D. They will not be dimensionalized. Not to say there won’t be 3D.” Well, that’s reassuring at least.
However, he told MTV in the Spring, he also says that “I’ll tell you what is buzzing around in my head now that we have the ability — the digital tools, performance capture — I’m starting to think about Roger Rabbit,” suggesting that motion capture will be used to some degree. While the idea of Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner actually animating their cartoon equivalents is intriguing, we think we’d rather that Zemeckis was returning to a more traditional toolbox for this one. But, if the source material means he can regain the mojo he lost sometime in the late ’80s, that can only be a good thing. Whether that can happen remains to be seen. His career trajectory has been in the “we don’t care” zone for quite some time.