It is being reported that Bob Hoskins, the actor who played Eddie Valiant in the original Who Framed Roger Rabbit film, will sign on to reprise his role for the Roger Rabbit Sequel.
He talked with The Daily Telegraph, saying:
“I don’t know how it’s going to work out. The format they want to do is the same as we did for A Christmas Carol. The thing is, it looks like a cartoon, so how do you put a cartoon in the middle of a cartoon? I can’t figure out how they are going to do it.”
What Bob Hoskins is referring to is the director, Robert Zemeckis (the original film director who will also direct the sequel) is set on using cartoons, but also computer generated humans - such as in his movies Beowulf, The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. The point of the Roger Rabbit movie was to combine cartoons with real humans - so if they are combined with digitally created humans that may look cartoonish, it loses the base of what made the original film so unique. Even if the humans are created so well as to look convincingly real - they still are not real humans - so then why not just put real people in it to begin with?
Hoskins admitted early on when the rumors of the sequel started that he is too old to partake in it like he did back in 1988. One use for the digital humans makes it possible to bring back the older actors, such as Hoskins - now in his late 60's, and include him just as much as in the original. They can look the same as they did years before and would not need to do stunts, or any work other than supply the voice.
The sequel is still a long way off as Robert Zemeckis is said to be working on his next movie - a computer generated version of The Beatles Yellow Submarine, not set for release until 2012.