![]() ![]() This would all have the making of a splendid Tom and Jerry farce, if not for those bothersome humans. He’s hired to take care of the hotel’s “mouse problem” - which is to say, Jerry. Eventually, Tom finds a way to monetize his rage. Tom, still chagrined over the mouse’s interference with his music career, pursues him with no thought of the destruction it will cause, to the hotel or to himself. Here, their team-ups are silent and tentative.)Įventually, Jerry settles in at a posh hotel, pilfering small items from purses to furnish his own miniature luxury pad, complete with tiny door and tiny “Do Not Disturb” sign. (Other iterations over the years have committed one of two cardinal Tom and Jerry sins: either having them talk, or turning them into friends. They both also remain silent, as in the original shorts. They’re reintroduced as New York hustlers of sorts: Tom is pretending to be a blind musician, because a sighted cat who can play the piano apparently isn’t impressive enough on its own, and Jerry earns Tom’s ire by horning in on his racket, attempting to raise money to buy himself a new home. ![]() In spite of its flaws, the movie does preserve the mutual antagonism between Tom (the cat) and Jerry (the mouse), as well as a certain animalistic self-interest. Visually, Tom & Jerry resembles those two underrated movies, letting cartoon slapstick loose in “our” world. Similarly, 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle adapted the self-referential 1960s TV series into a live-action/animation hybrid - to widespread disinterest from paying audiences. ![]() Space Jam did well, but the Bugs Bunny movie that owes more to the Roger Rabbit sensibility is really Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a 2003 flop directed by Joe Dante, who packed it with in-jokes, references, and mayhem sorely missing from the basketball movie. What’s more, the handful of attempts to imitate Roger Rabbit weren’t especially popular. Roger Rabbit is the rare technological-breakthrough movie that was almost immediately made obsolete: a few years after its release, advances in CGI made sure that no one would have to go to such back-breaking trouble to combine live action and animation. Surprisingly few movies have even attempted to replicate the success of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 marvel Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which combined live-action and animated characters with unprecedented, eye-popping dexterity. This is a path less traveled for adapting classic cartoon characters into a big-budget feature film. Tom, Jerry, and various other creatures are rounded out enough to pass for vaguely three-dimensional creations, but they have the same appealing design simplicity as the 2D animation of yore. Though the movie isn’t fully animated, it avoids the uncanny valley of the Garfield or Alvin and the Chipmunks films, instead portraying a hybrid New York City where all the humans are live-action, and all the animals are rendered as cartoons. Members of the original band, along with the likes of John Mayer, continue to tour the world as Dead & Company.Be thankful for small favors: The new movie Tom & Jerry does not re-imagine the famous cat-and-mouse enemies from countless cartoon shorts as photorealistic CG creations. The exact focus of the film has yet to be revealed, and given the Dead’s enduring popularity, there’s plenty of ground to cover: it’s just as easy to imagine a film focusing on the band’s rise in the 1960s as one that zooms out to cover everything up to Garcia’s death in 1995.Įither way, the star seems like a fit: In recent years, Hill has embraced the Grateful Dead’s trippy aesthetic, which remains hugely popular with old school fans, newcomers, and those who just love a good tie-dye long sleeve. Per Deadline, the film is being written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the duo behind American Crime Story: The People vs. And it’s coming via some heavy hitters: Apple’s streaming service is developing a Martin Scorsese-directed movie about Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, with Jonah Hill in the lead role. Deadheads and prestige cinema lovers rejoice: the Grateful Dead are finally getting the kind of high-caliber biopic one of rock’s most influential acts deserves. ![]()
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