With the original writers of Who Framed Roger Rabbit now at work on a potential sequel, Robert Zemeckis is starting to talk, in very guarded terms, about ideas for the film. Given that he’s become a massive proponent of performance capture technology, there have been questions (such as those raised by Brendon) about whether the original film’s blend of drawn animation and live action actors would be augmented by new tech. That seems likely to be the case, as evidenced by current statements from Zemeckis.

MTV got the director to talk very briefly about his approach to the film and the core characters. When asked if performance capture tech was part of the reason the movie was finally moving forward, he said,

That’s true, yeah, although I wouldn’t use if for the cartoon characters, because I think they should stay two-dimensional. That’s their charm. I wouldn’t dimensionalize Roger. And I couldn’t dimensionalize Jessica, even if I wanted to, because she doesn’t have a nose. We don’t want to give her a nose!…All the other characters that they would sort of have fun with would be magnificent in performance capture technology.

OK, so the core animated characters won’t be performance capture. That is good. But this leads to obvious questions. What are the ‘other characters’ Zemeckis is talking about? Humans or toons? Seeing toons dealing with new CGI and performance capture competition seems to make sense, but to make that happen the film’s time frame would have to be decades after the original’s. Given the fact that key humans like Bob Hoskins have obviously aged 20 years since the last movie, that’s not the most outlandish thing to consider.

And with respect to Bob Hoskins returning, Zemeckis had nothing real to say. No surprise there, but that will probably lead to more speculation that the film’s human characters will all be performance capture.