Despite being vastly different, here are all the ways 'Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers' is the spiritual sequel to 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'

Disney+'s latest original film Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers has been hailed by fans and critics alike as not only a modern marvel in referential meta-humor, but also an unexpected spiritual sequel to Robert Zemeckis' groundbreaking classic, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Despite being vastly different from one another in tone and execution, the parallels between the two hybrid films are hard to ignore as they both tell the absurdly grounded story of a noir cartoon crime thriller by mixing live-action and animation to create a world where toons and humans coexist.

While both films are cut from the same conceptual cloth, they each celebrate the medium of animation and lampoon the world of showbiz in their own ways. Who Framed Roger Rabbit looks at the golden age of Hollywood cartoons with a nostalgic reverence for animation’s biggest stars and uses the spectacle of toons living within the real world to tell a unique story about Hollywood and push the boundaries of visual and special effects techniques. Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers offers a transformative nostalgia for bygone cartoon greats and explores modern animation truisms through observational comedy rooted in clever irony and edgy subversions, serving as a meta-commentary on popular culture and the current animation industry.

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Both Roger Rabbit and Rescue Rangers build on the thesis of animated characters being fully dimensional performers that exist in our reality alongside flesh and blood performers. Although Roger Rabbit has far stronger characters and tells a more effective story with this concept, Rescue Rangers better demonstrates the full potential of the idea by giving its animated cast greater agency and narrative focus in the live-action world. Unlike Roger Rabbit and other hybrid buddy films of its kind — Sonic the Hedgehog, Hop, The Smurfs — the chipmunk duo are the principal leads that aren’t tethered to a human co-star. The film does greater justice to its premise by putting its toons at the forefront of the plot and their presence in the live-action world more apparent and inclusive.

In Roger Rabbit, while Roger himself, voiced by Charles Fleischer, was the titular character, he was far from the main lead. He may have been an active participant and major screen presence in the film, supplying the jokes and helping solve the case to prove his own innocence, but his agency was not what propelled the narrative. The film was conceived around the very notion of a self-serious human interacting with a classically silly cartoon. Human detective Eddie Valiant, played by Bob Hoskins, was the driving force of the film who carried the story as he coped his own prejudices against toons while on the case with Roger along as his comedic foil. It was Valiant’s growth and his perspective as a human in a toon-shared world that elicits the film’s underlying themes and its visual spectacle.

Valiant’s human focal point and the way the world of the film was conceptualized positioned the toon population as second-class citizens, whose treatment was analogous to how racial minorities were treated in the period the film is set in. Toons are traded and owned by studios and segregated into isolated clubs like The Ink and Paint Club’s toon revue and communities like ToonTown that are vulnerable to gentrification. In short, Roger Rabbit explored a world where toons as a populous were commodified and passively discriminated.

Rescue Rangers progresses the world created in Roger Rabbit and puts the toons front and center in their own story. The fully animated Chip and Dale, voiced respectively by John Mulaney and Andy Samberg, are affirmatively active protagonists of the film and take on the case to save their friend while struggling to revitalize their celebrity careers. By having both leads be toons themselves, the film focuses on the nature of their relationship as characters and their place in each other's lives as washed-up celebrities. Their identities as animated cartoon stars become secondary to the plot and their dynamic at hand, allowing the story to examine who they are instead of what they are.

Unlike in Roger Rabbit, Chip and Dale are not sidelined or juxtaposed to a human lead as they take on solving the mystery themselves. The film stars toons saving toons as agents of their own motivations. Roger and Valiant’s dynamic greatly focused on the dyad of a stick-in-the-mud live-action human and a wacky cartoon, putting the brunt of the conflict on Roger’s looniness. The conflict between them was defined by how different a toon is from a human and if they would ever get along, similarly to a mixed-race buddy film like Rush Hour. The conflict in Rescue Rangers is born out of the unresolved past tensions of the toons as fully developed characters and what kind of dynamic they have as friends despite them being animated. Having Rescue Rangers aim its focus on two toons together allowed the film to examine how toons in this kind of world act and relate to one another, giving the film its sense of ironic humor.

The film also puts the days and lives of toons in Los Angeles in greater focus than Roger Rabbit and does not treat them as an exploitable minority, but as a visible and respected population. The world Chip and Dale navigate is one fully immersed in toons alongside live-action humans in a way that is comedically sincere and naturalistic. They walk freely in the streets, are a recognizable presence in media and have more inner workings to their society than just having an isolated ToonTown. The presence of toons in Los Angeles as realized personalities among live sets and actors gives the world a richer sense of depth and the toons a greater sense of autonomy. Roger Rabbit portrayed toons just living in a human dominant world, but Rescue Rangers portrays harmonious integration of the animated and live-action. Rescue Rangers shows a progressive evolution of the world of Roger Rabbit by both incorporating a wider variety of animated characters in more sequences, but also holds the animated menagerie of toons as its own community, not as studio property.

The story revolves around the values and stakes of toons as people, adding to the film’s irony and its likability. Rescue Rangers treats the lives and functions of a toons in society with an unapologetic seriousness, which is where the film’s comedy is rooted in, but also helps evolve the idea of toons in the real world beyond a visual effects experiment. Roger Rabbit looked at the aesthetic and visual logistics of animated toons existing in live-action, but Rescue Rangers explored how toons would live and work as their own individuals in our world. For all of its jokes and gratuitous cameos, Rescue Rangers put its toons as characters first and visual effects caricatures second.

Austin Allison is an Animation Feature Writer for Collider. He is also an illustator, avid cartoon watcher, and occasional singer. His karaoke favorites include singing Rainbow Connection as Kermit the Frog and Frank Sinatra's My Way as Goofy. Check out his Instagram (@a_t_allison) and Twitter (@atallison_) for his latest artwork and to submit commssions.

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