Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Touchstone Pictures was intended to do a lot of things for Disney. It was meant to allow the studio to take risks on more adult-oriented fare, up to and including R-rated pictures. It was designed to increase Disney’s market share, more than tripling the number of films they released each year under the old business model. And it was supposed to make Disney, known for its penny-pinching, hackneyed storytelling, a more attractive place to work for filmmakers and stars like Bette Midler, Martin Scorsese and Barry Levinson.

It was not necessarily meant to create groundbreaking works of animation or to revitalize the public’s interest in the studio’s classic characters like Mickey and Donald, much less those from rival studios like Warner Bros. That was supposed to be Disney’s job. And yet, that’s exactly what it did in 1988 when it finally released Who Framed Roger Rabbit after nearly a decade of development. It was by a long stretch the most innovative and entertaining movie to come from Disney in many years. It also turned out to be something of an anomaly, a one-of-a-kind film that to this day has not been replicated.