Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

8. Toontown Spaces and the New Hybrid World

179 8 TOONTOWN SPACES AND THE NEW HYBRID WORLD The postmodern world, as we have previously noted, seems to confront us with a bewildering array of appearances, of false fronts, of illusive dimensions. As Paul Virilio and others describe this situation, we often feel that we have reached a state where a “reality effect” has replaced “immediate reality,” and consequently we increasingly feel “cinematized ” or “mediatized,” as if we all inhabited a world of movies (Lost 24). We have seen how elements of that effect almost inevitably seem to surface in instances of hybrid animation, that is, in those narratives that combine traditional, usually flat animation with live-action figures. In such films—as if they were trying to figure this very situation for their audience’s closer examination—real and cartoon figures share the same spaces, and the reality of each invariably reflects on that of the other. In fact, as the Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston note, because the characters in such narratives “come from different worlds,” the Disney artists typically found that they had to give “special consideration to make them compatible,” make special efforts at disguise, at shifting “the audience’s attention . . . into other areas” (527), such as backgrounds and overall mise-en-scène, so that audiences would not notice an inevitable draining away of the real. Yet in spite of all considerations , including ever more sophisticated image technologies, the very constructedness of such dualistic worlds quickly becomes apparent; the fact that we are literally facing a “reality effect” is simply unavoidable, although its larger implications often go unexplored. Yet despite such problems, hybrid animation has a long history in Animating Space 180 the American cinema; many of the major studios turned to it at one time or another, either as the central focus of their work, as in the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell cartoons, or as a special feature in otherwise conventional , live-action film, as in MGM’s Anchors Aweigh (1945). Disney, of course, started out in this mode with its Alice comedies of 1923– 1927, returned to it in a more ambitious manner with a string of postwar features, and then revisited it periodically with such efforts as Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Pete’s Dragon (1977), and others. Thus, its participation with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to produce Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) must have seemed quite logical, a state-of-the-art multiply hybrid project: a partnership with another company to create a stylistic combination that would bring together various cartoon characters (especially those of Disney and Warner Bros.) in a kind of “buddy story” about a “Toon” and a real private detective—a comic film noir. This partnership and project, however, would open a door onto more than just new company and character relationships. For in revisiting this old approach to animated films, in its retro styling, and in its resurrection of numerous classic cartoon characters, Roger Rabbit had to deal with the implications of hybridity in a way that the animated film had never done before, in fact, in a way that pointedly reflects on the postmodern character that was becoming endemic to film animation and to animating space. To help gauge both the difficulty and the implications of that negotiation with postmodernism’s reality effect, I consider Roger Rabbit alongside another work that also sought to capitalize on this return to hybrid animation and that similarly invites audiences to examine that same new spatial territory, Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World (1992). It is a film that is remarkably similar to Roger Rabbit: also offering parallel realms of humans (or “noids”) and cartoon characters (“doodles”); involving a male human protagonist, the cartoonist Jack Deebs, who, like Roger Rabbit’s Eddie Valiant, is sorely in need of redemption; introducing a highly sexualized female doodle, Holli Would, who is clearly kin to the earlier film’s Jessica Rabbit; and even involving a human detective character, Frank Harris, who works in the Cool World of the doodles. More important, it focuses much of its narrative, just as Roger Rabbit does, on the tensions between those two worlds, although in this case the Cool World that the narrative depicts is every bit as dreary and Toontown Spaces and the New Hybrid World 181 noirish as the human realm, and the possibility of mingling those worlds, of joining real and animated space, of hybridizing, is...