Who's Afraid of the Song of the South? And Other Forbidden Disney Stories by Jim Korkis

Author:Jim Korkis [Korkis, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Amazon: B00AG6G250
Publisher: Theme Park Press
Published: 2012-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

Jessica Rabbit: Drawn to Be Bad

The story of how Disney created a female animated bombshell that it couldn’t control.

“I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way,” affirmed Jessica Rabbit in her alluringly hoarse whisper of a voice in the Touchstone film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). CEO Michael Eisner considered the film too risqué, which is just one reason it was released under the Touchstone rather than the Disney label.

Disney female characters from Tinker Bell to various princesses have always embodied a healthy but innocent sexiness, but Jessica Rabbit was the first to be blatantly sexual in nature.

The stunningly beautiful and passionate Jessica was the human toon wife of cartoon comedy rabbit star Roger Rabbit. While redheaded Jessica does indeed appear as a sultry and glamorous night club singer at the Ink and Paint Club, underneath all the cel paint she was a fiercely loyal wife who loved Roger because he made her laugh.

In Gary Wolf’s original 1981 novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Jessica is a much more devious and jaded character not above using her sexual endowments to get what she wants. She had “a body straight out of one of the magazines adolescent boys pore over in locked bathrooms”, wrote Wolf.

Later in the book, detective Eddie Valiant pays $200 for a rare Tijuana Bible entitled Lewd, Crude, and In the Mood, which portrayed in graphic detail the antics of a randy, female nurse. The nurse was played by a younger, slimmer, blonder, but definitely recognizable Jessica Rabbit. When confronted with a copy of the book, Jessica claims she was only eighteen at the time, and Sid Sleaze drugged her and took the pictures.

Wolf said:

Jessica Rabbit came about because in my home town in Illinois, the boys outnumbered the girls thirty to one — so good luck getting a date if you’re president of the chess club. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about my ideal woman, and Jessica is that fantasy. She’s every boy’s dream. I based her on Red Hot Riding Hood from the Tex Avery cartoon Wild and Woolfy (1945). Jessica Rabbit is my idea of the perfect woman.

The harsher character description from the book influenced director Darrell Van Citters and designer Mike Giaimo when they tackled the first attempt at an animated version of the character for the Disney Company back in the early 1980s. In their sample animation, they made Jessica more of a traditional film-noir femme fatale who looked like a young Lauren Bacall, very slender and with high cheekbones.

During the writing of the Robert Zemeckis version of the story that was finally filmed, screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman wrote a draft of the script in which Jessica Rabbit was the villain who framed Roger for a crime.

It is the more endowed, more innocent version of Jessica seen in the Zemeckis film that owes a debt to director Tex Avery and artist Preston Blair and their earlier creation of a sexy female human toon character now known as Red Hot Riding Hood for a series of MGM cartoons.

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