second on the screen).
Animation Director Richard Williams
commented about how Toons had been
combined with humans in past films;
"You see the trick and are not able
to suspend your disbelief."
Animation Director Richard Williams
set out to break three rules that previously
had been conventions for combining
live action with animation.
1. Move the camera as much
as possible so the Toons don't look
pasted onto flat backgrounds.
2. Use lighting and shadows to an extreme
that had never before been attempted
(each shadow required at least
five optical effects elements).
3. Have the Toons interact with real world
objects and people as much as possible.
Each weasel in these scenes had five layers
of special, hand painted, lighting effects
to give them a three-dimensional quality.
That added up to 25 pieces of artwork
for each frame or 600 drawings per second.
Before the weasel got a hold
of this soap, it was carried around
the live-action set by a puppeteer.
The puppeteer with the thinnest hand
was chosen so that his hand could
later be covered up by the Toon.
Because the camera kept moving,
changing the point of view
animators had to work extra hard
so the Toons wouldn't appear to be
slipping or sliding around over the set.
Mae West was an actress who gained
great popularity in the 1930s. Her comedy
was marked by its campy, suggestive humour.
Dolores's upcoming line is a parody of
a typical Mae West line, "Is that a gun in
your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
Animation Director Williams commented
how an early comedy team
influenced this film;
"Laurel and Hardy are funny
because they're constantly getting
tangled up physically with each other."
"We thought the cartoon characters
should always be affecting their environment
orgetting tangled up with the live actors."
Filmmakers originally planned
to have 40 minutes of animation,
but ended up with 55 minutes
out of the total 104 minutes of the film.
The animation took two years to complete,
with animators sometimes having
to work 20 hours a day to meet deadlines.
Following this scene, the film's original script
included Marvin Acme's funeral.
Planned as a major animated sequence,
the idea went only as far as storyboards
and preliminary dialogue recording
before being abandoned.
At the funeral,
Eddie was to get a clue that lead to
another scene that was also deleted here.
In that sequence, Judge Doom caught
Eddie snooping around Jessica's room.
To teach him a lesson, Doom had the weasels
take the nosey detective to Toontown.
Moments later in that deleted scene,
Eddie is kicked out of Toontown
with a cartoon pig on his head.
To cover the deletion, Eddie answers Dolores
off camera - a line change dubbed in later.
He returns to his office to wash
the painted pig head off with turpentine.
That's why he is coming out
of the shower here.
As with most films,
many bits like that were trimmed out
of the movie to keep the pace going.
In addition, co-writer Jeffrey Price
thought it was funnier to show
the similarity between humans and Toons
rather than bringing attention
to their differences.
Portions of the "Pig Head Sequence"
were cut back into
the 1991 CBS telecast of the film.
The original theatrical trailer
also contained some of the footage.
"You'll never work in this town again,"
is a clichй line about how film industry
executives abuse power
to threaten people into cooperation.
Actress Kathleen Turner wanted to
work again with director Zemeckis
after Romancing The Stone (1984).
As Jessica's voice, she asked for
her performance to be uncredited.
It didn't stay a secret for long.
Joanna Cassidy changed
her hair colour because her natural red
was too similar to Jessica's red hair.
Perhaps Jessica didn't want any competition.
The film had been in and out of development
for four years when exterior filming
finally began in Los Angeles, California
in December, 1986.
On Richard