my presentation Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Amy Schmidt

English 101

Who Framed Roger Rabbit Presentation Outline

I. Introduction

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is set in the city of Hollywood the year is 1947. Eddie Valiant is the hard nose detective who is trying to find out who killed Marvin Acme and why. This movie is film noir for both adults and children.

II. Elements of Classic Noir

1. Eddie Valiant is the Detective of the story. He wears a trench coat, drinks whiskey and smokes cigarettes.



2. Jessica Rabbit is the femme fatale in the story. She is the image of what every guy thinks is the perfect woman. She sings at the ink and paint club and has every man there under her spell. She hits her husband Roger over the head with a frying pan. You don’t know if she is good or bad until near the very ending of the movie.

III. Elements of Neo Noir

As Mark Conard says in The Philosophy of Neo Noir “Important among these changes are the placing of social issues, like race, class, and gender” (8). This is important to the topic of my essay because it shows how film noir is developing in to something that makes you look below the surface of the film.



1. Half the cast in this movie is cartoons. They live in a place called Toon Town. The only place you see them are when they are working on the set or in the Ink and Paint club, or when we see Toon Town. This shows a separation of the races with very little mixing going on. That shows how it was back in the day and even a little bit today. The races shall remain separate and have very little mixing going on. This shows in the old film noir movies it was all white people and you never saw any people of color if you did it was very brief. Just there world and everything was rosy.



In the article “Opposite Attract: Light and Dark Who Framed Roger Rabbit” Frank Candiloro says “Eddie Valliant had all the characteristics of a cartoon character before turning into the cynical, hard-edge film noir detective we see in the film”(123). The shows how much of a change has happened to Eddie and how effected he is by all that has happened to him.

2. Back story in the movie we find out that Eddie Valiant’s brother Theodore was killed by a toon that dropped a piano on them from 15 stories Eddie only had a broken arm and his brother died. This has a dramatic effect on Eddie. His girlfriend Dolores says he hasn’t been the same since. How This is Neo Noir is you find out about past events that made him into the man he is today. In Classic Noir you see the detective and you have no idea how he has gotten to be the way he is. This gives the character more depth and allows you to have a closer connection to the character.