ROGER RABBIT Sequel Under Development- Again

Director Robert Zemeckis has been making noise over the past several months about the possibility of finally doing a follow up to his classic melding of live action and animation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Well, on Friday, MTV reported that the director has told them that work on a script for a sequel is underway with original screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman. Although Zemeckis is currently pounding the pavement for his latest motion-capture animation film A Christmas Carol, he took time to divulge some details of the in development project, which MTV plans on doling out in small drips and drabs over the next few days. (Teases.)

There have been a few attempts to get a new Roger Rabbit film off the ground since the first film proved such a hit for Disney back in 1988. The first, subtitled The Toon Platoon, focused on Roger heading to Hollywood to find the mother who gave him up for adoption only to enlist in World War Two and save a beautiful red-headed ‘toon by the name of Jessica from a Nazi agent.  A later attempt saw Roger heading to Broadway where he falls for a beautiful red-headed ‘toon chorus girl named Jessica.

Of course, what made the original such a hit was the seamless interaction of hand-drawn animated characters with flesh and blood ones. Zemeckis has often talked about his love of motion capture driven computer animation, the process he has used for his last few films. Is he hoping to replace all the wonderful work done by animation supervisor Richard Williams and his crew on the first film with some computer generated version of Roger, Jessica and Baby Herman? I hope not, but I have a bad feeling that he may be leaning that way.