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Humans and Cartoons - TOGETHER

There is something inherently magical about watching a real human being argue with a cartoon character.


It's one of those movie tricks that, when it's done correctly, still makes me smile no matter how old I get. You know intellectually that Bob Hoskins is standing there talking to absolutely nothing. You know Gene Kelly isn't really dancing with Jerry Mouse. You know Dick Van Dyke isn't actually surrounded by animated penguin waiters.


But if the filmmakers do their jobs properly, within about thirty seconds you stop thinking about the technique and simply accept that human beings and cartoons occupy the same universe.


And with the long-delayed release of the very entertaining Coyote vs. Acme, I thought this would be a good excuse to look back at this very particular kind of filmmaking and put together two lists: five of the best live-action/animation combinations ever made and five of the worst.


Coyote vs. Acme has, of course, already had one of the strangest journeys to the screen in recent movie history. The film was essentially completed years ago and then became part of that infuriating period when Warner Bros. Discovery started shelving finished movies as financial write-offs.


A completely finished movie, made by hundreds of artists and craftspeople, was suddenly in danger of simply disappearing.


Thankfully, filmmakers, animators, fans and basically anyone who believes that movies should actually be allowed to exist made enough noise about it that the film was eventually rescued, with Ketchup Entertainment stepping in to release it.


And I'm glad they did, because Coyote vs. Acme is a really enjoyable movie and a terrific modern example of how much fun this combination of live action and animation can still be.

The basic technique is almost as old as movies themselves.


Long before computers, motion capture or digital compositing, filmmakers were already trying to figure out how to place things that couldn't possibly exist next to actual human beings.


Georges Méliès was experimenting with cinematic illusion almost from the beginning of the medium. J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing in 1900 played with drawings interacting with a real performer. Max Fleischer developed rotoscoping in the 1910s and created the Out of the Inkwell cartoons, where Koko the Clown seemed to escape from an animator's drawing board and interact with the real world.


And before Walt Disney had Mickey Mouse, he had the Alice Comedies, which reversed the idea by taking a real little girl and placing her inside an animated universe. That's pretty amazing when you think about it.


Filmmakers have basically been asking, "How do we make a real person interact with something that isn't really there?" for more than a century.


Then you had the great stop-motion artists like Willis O'Brien and, later, Ray Harryhausen. The Lost World in 1925 was an enormous step forward, and O'Brien's work on King Kong in 1933 remains some of the most important visual-effects work ever created.


Harryhausen would take those techniques even further, creating monsters and creatures that could battle live-action actors through painstaking frame-by-frame animation.


Now, technically, I'm casting a slightly narrower net with this particular list.


I'm not talking about every movie that contains an animated effect somewhere. Otherwise we'd be here forever. King Kong, the Harryhausen movies, The Evil Dead, Beetlejuice, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars movies and countless others combine some form of animation, stop motion, CGI or visual effects with photographed actors.


I'm interested specifically in movies where that interaction between live-action people and visibly animated characters is a major part of the movie's identity. Movies where the cartoons are basically cast members.


Disney, naturally, became enormously important in developing that idea. The Three Caballeros in 1944 had Donald Duck interacting with live performers. Song of the South combined live-action storytelling with lengthy animated sequences.


And then in 1964 came Mary Poppins, which remains one of the most famous examples of the technique. That chalk-painting sequence is still wonderful.


Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke step into an animated environment, interact with cartoon animals, ride carousel horses and, most memorably, Van Dyke dances with those animated penguins. It was an extraordinary technical achievement at the time, but more importantly, it was charming. The technology never became more important than the scene.


Disney continued experimenting with the format in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, with its underwater nightclub and insane animated soccer match, and in Pete's Dragon, where an animated dragon named Elliott was dropped directly into a live-action town.


I loved Pete's Dragon as a kid. The animation doesn't exactly hold up like some of the best examples of this technique, but there's still something incredibly appealing about the basic idea.


And that's really the key to all of these movies: the trick by itself isn't enough.


You can have the most sophisticated technology in the world, but if the characters don't feel like they're actually interacting, the illusion collapses. The actors have to look in exactly the right place. Their timing has to match movement that won't even be animated until months later. Objects have to move correctly. Shadows have to fall correctly. Characters have to appear to occupy the same physical space.


That's why that Gene Kelly sequence in Anchors Aweigh is still so impressive. Kelly dances with Jerry Mouse, and the whole thing feels playful and spontaneous even though it required insane planning and precision.


Then, in 1988, Robert Zemeckis basically blew the doors off the entire form with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For me, that's the masterpiece. That's the movie every live-action/animation hybrid has been chasing ever since.


Who Framed Roger Rabbit isn't simply a technical achievement. It's one of the great movies of the 1980s, period. It's a film noir, a comedy, a mystery, an animation showcase and a love letter to Hollywood history all at once. Bob Hoskins gives one of the great performances opposite characters who literally did not exist while he was filming.


And the animation is extraordinary.


The characters aren't just pasted onto live-action footage. They touch things. They cast shadows. They grab physical objects. They move through changing light. Roger gets handcuffed to Hoskins. Jessica Rabbit walks into the Ink & Paint Club and suddenly becomes one of the most unforgettable animated characters ever created.


But the truly historic part of Roger Rabbit is that it brought together characters whose owners normally would never allow them to share a frame.


Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Donald Duck and Daffy Duck.


Disney characters, Warner Bros. characters, Fleischer characters, MGM characters—all existing together in Toontown. That will probably never happen again in quite the same way.


It's an extraordinary piece of Hollywood history and, without question, the crowning achievement of this entire genre.


There have been plenty of other great attempts.


One of my childhood favorites is The Incredible Mr. Limpet, with Don Knotts turning into an animated fish. I loved Don Knotts when I was a kid, and I loved that movie. It's weird and sweet and completely committed to its premise.


Then you've got James and the Giant Peach, another terrific hybrid that moves between live action and stop-motion animation. Enchanted cleverly flips between a traditional Disney cartoon universe and real-world Manhattan. Casper used 1990s CGI remarkably well for its time.


And Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action remains seriously underrated. Dante actually understands those characters. He understands the anarchic energy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and the Warner Bros. cartoons, and the movie treats them like characters rather than corporate logos.


That's important, because we also have the other side of this list. The bad ones. And there are some really bad ones. Because live-action/animation hybrids can become unbearably cynical when the technology exists simply to sell merchandise or exploit a recognizable character.


The Alvin and the Chipmunks movies are a perfect example. Loud, ugly, obnoxious, corporate product masquerading as entertainment. The live-action Smurfs movies aren't much better.


Then there are the two Space Jam movies. I know people have nostalgia for the original Space Jam. I don't. I think both Space Jam movies are awful.


The first one arrived during the height of Michael Jordan mania and the 1990s explosion of Looney Tunes merchandise, when every kid in America seemed to have Bugs Bunny on a T-shirt, jacket or hat. So Warner Bros. took some of the greatest cartoon characters ever created and basically turned them into a feature-length commercial.


The Looney Tunes were never supposed to be cute mascots selling gym shoes.


Those original cartoons were anarchic, violent, surreal and frequently insane. Bugs Bunny was a wiseass. Daffy Duck was a psychotic egomaniac. Yosemite Sam was constantly attempting murder. Strip away that personality and you're left with branding.


And that's the difference between something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and something like Space Jam. One celebrates animation history. The other exploits it.


Ralph Bakshi's Cool World is another notorious failure. Bakshi is an enormously important figure in adult animation, and the movie has some fascinating visual ideas, but nothing gels. The live-action and animation frequently feel like they're fighting each other, the story is a mess and Holli Would feels like somebody looked at Jessica Rabbit and said, "Can we make that, only sleazier?"


Then there's The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle from 2000, a movie that somehow contains Robert De Niro, Jason Alexander and some truly terrible animation. If you've ever wanted to watch Robert De Niro give one of the most bizarre performances of his career while interacting with Rocky and Bullwinkle, well... there it is.


So this particular technique can produce masterpieces and complete disasters. When it works, there's genuine wonder to it.


Watching real people interact with cartoons activates something in us that goes all the way back to childhood. It breaks one of the fundamental rules of reality. Cartoons aren't supposed to exist in our world. Human beings aren't supposed to be able to walk into theirs.

Movies let that happen.


And Coyote vs. Acme understands exactly why that's fun. Wile E. Coyote can stand next to a human actor and somehow, if everybody does their job properly, we accept it. That's the magic trick.


So I'm very happy that Coyote vs. Acme finally escaped the corporate vault and made it into theaters. Support it. We need movies that are allowed to be weird, imaginative and playful, especially when hundreds of talented people have already spent years making them.


And in honor of its release, here are ten examples of what can happen when filmmakers decide to put human beings and cartoons in the same movie.


Five examples where it works beautifully. And five examples where somebody really should have left the cartoons alone.


Here are THE FIVE BEST and THE FIVE WORST LIVE-ACTION/ANIMATION MOVIES.


THE WORST:








THE BEST:









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