Programme notes
Why Don't You Do Right - Jessica Rabbit
Summary
The Jessica Rabbit nightclub sequence from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis's 1988 film, in which an animated character performs a torch song on a stage full of live-action actors. The song is a blues standard from the 1930s, most associated with Peggy Lee's recording with Benny Goodman.\n\nJessica is voiced in dialogue by Kathleen Turner, uncredited on release, with the singing performed by Amy Irving — a division of labour that was standard practice and rarely disclosed at the time.\n\nWhat makes the scene technically remarkable is the lighting. The animated figure is not merely composited over the footage: she is drawn to catch the club's coloured light, casts shadow, and is occluded by real objects, so she appears to occupy the room rather than float on it.
Why it matters
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the high-water mark of hand-drawn animation combined with live action, and this sequence is its most-cited scene. The technique — animating to match real camera moves and lighting, frame by frame, without digital compositing — was enormously labour-intensive and effectively never attempted again at this scale, because computer-generated imagery arrived shortly afterwards and made the problem a different one.\n\nThe film also mattered commercially: its success is generally credited with helping revive theatrical animation as a serious business at the end of the eighties, feeding directly into the animation boom that followed.\n\nAs a piece of design, Jessica Rabbit became a permanent reference — a caricature of the film-noir femme fatale drawn to the point of absurdity, and one of the few animated characters recognised by silhouette alone.