Roger Rabbit caused religious controversy, reveals key animator 38 years later

Animation legend Phil Nibbelink recalls the making of a memorable gag from Who Framed Roger Rabbit

During the final warehouse conflict in the animated/live-action classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the evil Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) pulls a sword on hero detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins). Desperate to defend himself, Valiant looks around and finds a box labeled “Singing Sword.” He opens the box and whips out a rubbery cartoon sword that looks and sounds like Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” as the blade sways back and forth. Embarrassed by the unintimidating weapon, Valiant stares at it, then chucks it away in search of some other way to save himself.

While the singing sword gag is one of many memorable jokes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s just about the only one worth bringing up on Cool Sword Day. That’s why Polygon reached out to Phil Nibbelink, a veteran animation director of films like An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. Nibbelink also served as a supervising animator on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, overseeing and hand-drawing many bits of animation in the film, including the Singing Sword, which he says had a few stumbling blocks on its way to the big screen.

The first challenge came with designing the sword.

Nibbelink says, "When you think about young, 1930s Frank Sinatra, he was thin, so that made sense with the sword. He also has sort of a V-shape to him — he's very triangular, with a pointy chin. Then came his flat top, but you have the sword, which has a point on top. So I was struggling with the design because the point was fighting the flat top. We had a meeting with the director, Bob Zemeckis and the director of animation, Richard Williams. All three of us sat around and tried to figure it out.

"Now, not to speak ill of the dead, but Richard Williams was a highly emotional artist, a brilliant artist, but emotional, and he would get angry and scream to the heavens. The only time he got angry with me was here, when I was concerned with the fact that Frank Sinatra was famous for his flat top, because I was presenting a problem that I hadn't figured out. The answer was just to simply put a bar of color for the hair. At first, it was going to be an all silver sword, but the only way to solve the problem was to have a bar of color to indicate the fact that his hairline was flat on top, then we would just go for a white triangle on top of that."

Later, while drawing the scene, Nibbelink struggled with where exactly to place the sword.

“The scene was a little bit difficult because Bob Hoskins was looking more or less straight at the camera,” says Nibbelink. “I had to put the singing sword just off camera so you could see his eyes and I couldn't cover his face. So if you look at the scene, you'll see that Bob Hoskins' eyeline is not very good. We worked very hard in all our shots to make sure the eyeline was correct. Bob was excellent when he would look at Roger Rabbit. He'd actually cross his eyes and you would find where Roger Rabbit had to be in order for it to look exactly like he's living in that space that Bob Hoskins was imagining. The effect was magic. But in this particular shot, if you look at it, it's off by a degree or two, but because my animation is so over-animated, you're looking at the sword and you're not looking at his eyes.”

Nibbelink’s final issue with the sword was more complicated than eyelines or character design. It came after he’d drawn his portion of the scene, which he says was about every other frame featuring the sword. At 24 frames per second and about 20 seconds of screentime, the sword amounted to about 480 drawings. So after Nibbelink did about 240 of them, it was time for him to hand it off to his assistant to do the in-betweens.

“But she decides, ‘Oh, he's singing a song about wicked witchcraft and I'm a very religious Christian. I can't work on that because it's blasphemous,’” recalls Nibbelink. “I go, 'No, no, no, you don't understand.' I played the whole song for her and said, ‘You see? It's just that he's fallen in love with this woman and she has this power over him, like witchcraft.' She said, 'I still can't do it.' So, we got the manager involved, Don Hahn, who was the associate producer. He says, 'It's okay. I'll put her on with somebody else and we'll get somebody else to help you in-between the thing.'”

The problem, however, didn’t stop there.

“Come to find out,” Nibbelink continues, “she wrote a letter to Zemeckis saying that she felt it was the work of the devil and it was terrible. I go, 'Oh my God, have you sent this letter!? Tell me you haven't sent the letter yet!' She says, 'I sent it.’ I go, 'Why did you send it?' and she says, 'Because I knew you'd try to talk me out of it.' Anyways, no harm came of it. Apparently Zemeckis read the letter and graciously ignored it. So, disaster averted.”