BD: And what was it like working with the animators?

RW: Well, they were all fans and I could cast the ones most appropriate for the character. And we started with just a handful. In fact, at the end, we ended up with huge amounts of people. But I'd say there were 10 that were really doing the film. And I animated a ton of stuff on it. I did the drawing on every scene, that's for sure. I animated the first minute by myself. I was heavily animating throughout and I ran a repair shop, which was always full. So that's how it was: it was a rush, really, a high adrenaline thing from the beginning.

BD: What was it like being based in London?

RW: I said you have to do it in London. I had my studio there (which I had been running for nearly 25 years), so we had the whole team in place. And then, strangely enough, our lease was up on the building that we were in. And then, coincidentally, then came Spielberg and we moved to a big place in Camden Town, and that's how we started. And we piled on more people. And at the end of the picture, I was liberated both between Disney and Spielberg setting up Amblin animation and taking away our animators. I was sick of carrying a large studio. I wanted to just do the work.

Robert Zemeckis and Roger Rabbit.

Ken Ralston
BD: You're currently working on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which is a very ambitious hybrid of live action and CG. Are there some interesting parallels with Roger Rabbit?

Ken Ralston: Yes, Alice reminds me in a vague way of Roger. There's the March Hare: we have a two-scale rubber version of him for actor reference, not lighting reference because there are so many virtual environments. And we had to build Toonland from scratch, which is like Underland or Wonderland. Roger changed animation. When I first got the script from Bob, I thought it was awful. It seemed like an odd choice for him. Little did I know, it was just the start of a series of odd choices.

BD: When did you realize that this was going to be special?

KR: I went to a meeting at Amblin and there were these sculptures and they all had a Tex Avery look and I knew what they were going for. We shot this weird test at ILM where we came up with some things that would push buttons. It was ridiculously hard but I enjoyed it. We laughed at dailies constantly. It came at the exact time in my career. I was tired of spaceships. And it was what I loved: a Tex Avery/Chuck Jones homage with a bizarre Chinatown story.

BD: Talk about the main technical challenge.

KR: It was important to blend in with real world. This was not a CG hybrid of a cartoon. Hanging on to the aesthetic was important to me. I knew Tex, having worked in commercials with him. We built two VistaVision cameras for the movie at ILM. They didn't roll serious film in the VistaVision cameras until they shot the movie. That's how hectic it was: chasing down Hope Street in L.A. before Christmas and going back and forth to England. Those kinds of things drove me nuts -- having to be so on top of everything because everything is an effects shot. You don't know the requirements until you do it. With Bob, he's very flexible. What a mind. And trying to keep up with his ideas is painful at times.

BD: How has your Roger experience helped you on Alice?

KR: I couldn't have been on Alice without Roger. To be a part of Roger and how it touched people is cool. These tools are great, but, as I keep saying, it's how you use them. I can at least try to pre-empt issues that come up. It's a fast shoot, and I anticipate problems so they don't blow up in your face. The variables are endless -- technical and aesthetic.

Andrew Farago is the gallery manager and curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and the creator of the weekly online comic serial The Chronicles of William Bazillion.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.