I undersold it a bit I guess. I liked the book, but having seen the movie first there was a bit of a disconnect when I finally read the book because they are so different. The book is full of really good ideas and I agree it has a good ending. Large chunks of the story worked better, for me, as ideas than they did as actual elements of the novel and in many cases I think the movie took the same ideas and did more interesting things with them. But the book is worth reading.
See, I liked the story better than in the movie. The movie is a lot of fun, but I think the book is more interesting.
Can you be more specific on parts you think the movie did better?
Can someone spoilerbox the ending to the book? I’m not likely to ever read it, but some of the posts here have me wondering what must’ve happened.
It’s not just the ending. It’s a completely different story. In the book, Roger Rabbit hires Valiant to find out why his employers have backed out on an agreement. Shortly after that Roger is murdered in his own home. (Not a spoiler, it’s the premise of the novel). Roger’s doppelganger, a temporary copy that toons are able to create of themselves to serve as a stunt double, approaches Valiant and asks him to try to find the murderer before he expires.
Instead of being filmed, in the novel toons pose for comic strips, so the cameo appearances include characters like Hagar the Horrible.
I liked the book better than the movie, but I might have felt differently had I seen the movie first.
The follow up novel, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit, wasn’t a sequel. It was a mostly unrelated story with the same characters.
Going from memory…
The toons can create dopplegangers of themselves that can last, I believe, 3 days. This is how they survive safes dropping on them, etc. Create a doppleganger the gets crushed while the real toon is kept safe. RR’s doppleganger is trying to solve his own murder. And I’m fuzzy on this, but I believe RR’s doppleganger is hoping that he can bring Roger back to life. Anyway, it ends with RR either failing to do what needs to be done to pull it off or learning that it can’t be done and the real RR never had a chance at resurrection and RR fading away to oblivion as his time expired.
Thanks.
Most of that is correct, but that’s not really what’s so great about the ending. You know all that a long time before the end of the book. At least, when I talk about the ending, I’m talking about the solution to the main mystery.
[spoiler]And that’s not the eponymous “Who censored [aka killed] Roger Rabbit?” as that turns out to be just wacky hijinks you could never guess. The real mystery is what Valiant is actually hired to solve, a mystery that shares the title of the movie, “Who framed Roger Rabbit?”
And the answer is–No one. Roger actually killed the record executive. The clues are all there. The biggest one is that his duplicate is so long lived, something that would only happen if Roger put a lot of effort into making the duplicate exactly like him. He had created the duplicate to give him an alibi while the real Roger went and killed the exec.
His death, which put a damper in his plans, was only loosely related. It helps fill in the backstory, but is otherwise unimportant.[/spoiler]
Roy Cohn et al.