'Who Framed Roger Rabbit'To misquote Jessica Rabbit: "Sequels to beloved animated / live-action classics aren't all bad. They're just motion-captured that way." As our own Elisabeth Rabbit Rappe reported earlier this year, Robert Zemeckis has been thinking about a sequel to 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And now the sequel is moving forward toward reality. Zemeckis told MTV News that "a script is in development" for a sequel, and original writers Peter S. Seaman and Jeffrey Price are involved.

Way back when, Seaman and Price adapted Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a novel by Gary K. Wolff. The hard-boiled mystery drew upon the history of the Los Angeles transit system and provided a strong framework for a dazzling mixture of traditional cell animation and live-action period footage. Wolff wrote a sequel, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?, and other follow-up ideas have been discussed over the years, but Zemeckis says he wasn't involved in any of them.

Of course, any sequel script would need to be very, very good on its own merits to have any hope of living up to the original. In view of Zemeckis' fascination, nay, obsession with performance capture digital tools, I share Elisbeth's fear that a new Roger Rabbit will be "a dead-eyed motion capture and not a lovable toon." The original was a mystery, a comedy, and a thriller, but it was the idea of brightly-colored cartoons living side by side with humans in a mundane real world that gave the film its distinctive flavor. Whose performances will be computer-animated in the sequel -- humans, 'toons, or both?