Roger and Jessica Rabbit, the two halves of the most unlikely marriage in animation, here in their model-cel turnarounds, each painted as a working reference for the army of artists who had to keep them on-model across a film that asked cartoon characters to share the frame with living actors.
These are the hand-painted model cels, paired with the printed studio model sheets that accompanied them. Roger's cel holds two turnaround poses, a front view and a back, with "FREE RIDE 4" lettered along the bottom edge and the production number 57433 taped beneath, alongside a "73%" reduction note. Jessica's matching cel sits over its own field-chart sheet, the same 57433 number written below, her front and rear turnarounds laid out for the same purpose.
Both cels are studded with the small circular YEL, RED and BLU calibration targets that ringed the artwork during filming. On Who Framed Roger Rabbit those targets did real work: the film's compositing married hand-painted cels to live-action plates through hand-rendered shadows and separate lighting passes, and the camera and lab crews used these colour targets to lock the exposure and colour balance of the painted animation to the photographed world it was dropped into. In a finished frame they sit outside the matte and are never seen. Here they are part of the document.
The printed sheets are where the colour discipline lives. Roger's lists the basic colour suggestions in Pantone references, line by line: the cowlick at Pantone 021, the buttons, polka dots and gloves at Pantone Yellow, the coveralls at 186, the soles and inside ears at 182, right down to the tongue and inside mouth. Jessica's does the same, her hair at Pantone Warm Red, her dress at Pantone Rubine Red, her gloves, shoes, eye shadow and lips each pinned to a number. Both sheets run the figures along a height chart so every artist on the picture drew them at a consistent scale and in consistent colour, even with consumer products.
This is the machinery that kept two of the eighties' most recognisable characters identical across thousands of frames and dozens of hands.
Model cels do turn up from time to time. What is uncommon is finding them still sitting with the process material that surrounded them, the calibration targets in place and the matched printed sheets that told the studio exactly what colour everything had to be. The pair are full turnarounds rather than single poses, painted with the care the reference role demanded, the expressions and proportions fixed for everyone downstream to follow.
Roger arms wide and grinning, Jessica in her slit gown and opera gloves, the comedy duo and the femme fatale who together carried a film that changed what animation and live action could do in the same shot, here in the exact form the studio used to build them.
Estimate: £2,500 - £5,000 Ω
See Online Here: 246. Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit Hand-Painted Technical Model sheets and Printed Height Colour Charts ### WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988)
