![]() ![]() It feels much more like the work of its director, '80s tech whiz Robert Zemeckis Spielberg was undoubtedly more hands-on than any Disney executive even the animation itself is less reminiscent of the genial vaudeville of a Mickey short than of the gleefully morbid work that Tex Avery did at MGM.īut a Disney movie it nonetheless is, and a fairly important one for the company's continued well-being: the highest-grossing of all the studio's films in the 1980s, the second-highest grossing film of 1988 (behind, unfathomably, Rain Man), the highest-grossing animated or semi-animated film in history at the time of its release. Only eleven years separate Roger Rabbit from the flaccid Pete's Dragon they are divided much more by two different worldviews of what "Disney Entertainment" could mean.Īnd truth be told, the film really doesn't feel very "Disney", for all that Roger made the expected appearances at Disney theme parks and in Disney comics for several years after the film came out, before its popularity started waning around the turn of the '00s (it was, at any rate, released through Disney's "grown-up" label, Touchstone Pictures). Eisner was, and it was a result of these and similar choices that allowed Roger Rabbit to be produced for an amount of money unheard-of in those days, and that caused it to be one of the great comic masterpiece of the 1980s. Miller would never, ever have thought to co-produce a movie with Amblin Entertainment nor would he likely have been okay with outsourcing the animation to the degree that was done. That, in a nutshell, is the sea change that happened to company: from thinking an idea looked fun and offered good opportunities for the animators (noble impulses, that I would not like to denigrate, though a 1981 version of Roger Rabbit would undoubtedly have been much worse than the one released), and actually figuring out how to go about making a successful movie. Nothing came of the idea until 1985, when Eisner thought that the story would work well in the new wave of blockbuster effects-driven comedies that were coming into vogue around that time and at that point, he approached Steven Spielberg about executive producing. Wolf's 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a humorous mystery novel about a world where comic strip figures and human beings interact. It was Miller who first purchased the rights to Gary K. ![]() Miller was different from the company under Michael Eisner. I bring this up because the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, eventually released in the summer of 1988, is an excellent case study of how the company under Ron W. Well, duh, you might think, and yet in the era of The Black Cauldron and its discontents, it seems that whoever was minding the shop at Disney had no idea at all of how to make a wise business decision. ![]() When the Walt Disney Company fell under the control of Michael Eisner and company in the 1980s, one of the biggest changes they made to corporate culture - and this is, in hindsight, so utterly self-evident that it hardly bears me saying it - was a new emphasis on movies that would make lots of money. ![]()
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