Robert Zemeckis can't shut up about his Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel now. Before it was nada. Now it's mucho. Just a few days ago we had the story about the original writers taking over the scripting chores. The other half of that story involved what technology Zemeckis would be using. He's been a forerunner in the realm of performance capture technology(seen in his upcoming A Christmas Carol), but would that be appropriate for something like Roger Rabbit? In an interview with MTV this is what he had to say...
That’s true, yeah, although I wouldn’t use if for the cartoon characters, because I think they should stay two-dimensional. That’s their charm. I wouldn’t dimensionalize Roger. And I couldn’t dimensionalize Jessica, even if I wanted to, because she doesn’t have a nose. We don’t want to give her a nose!…All the other characters that they would sort of have fun with would be magnificent in performance capture technology.
Sounds to me like we aren't going to be seeing any real people in the movie, rather a mix of performance capture and 2-D characters. To me, you don't mess with the toon characters' look. They are meant to be old school cartoon figures that are flat. How else can they flatten themselves against the floor, or throw that black hole against the wall and run through it?(my favorite looney toons gag). It's been twenty years since the last movie, and Christopher Lloyd and Bob Hoskins obviously haven't gotten any younger. So it makes perfect sense to use performance capture on their characters in order to maintain their original "youth". I just hope basically throwing these two very different animated styles together doesn't translate into a muddy look on the screen.
