Investigating Nostalgia - Featuring "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "Pokemon: Detective Pikachu"

The 1700’s and the age of exploration saw a massive swell of people leaving their homelands for an extended period or even for life. From this explosion of displacement emerged a new medical phenomenon. Travelers were diagnosed with excessive irritability, loss of productivity, and even hallucinations. The common denominator among those afflicted was an overwhelming homesickness. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave a name to this condition. The name combines the Latin words algos, meaning “pain” or “distress,” and nostos, meaning “homecoming,” to create the word nostalgia. Appleton's Journal, 23 May 1874, describes the affliction:

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

“The nostalgic loses his gayety, his energy, and seeks isolation in order to give himself up to the one idea that pursues him, that of his country. He embellishes the memories attached to places where he was brought up, and creates an ideal world where his imagination revels with an obstinate persistence.”

Contemporary discussion on nostalgia has shifted. Today when you hear about a person being “afflicted” with nostalgia, it probably just means that person is an Annual Passholder at one of the Disney parks. (Not shading. I have been a part of that group before and may yet find myself in their ranks again before my time.) Nostalgia isn’t considered an illness, though it is something we’re still a little unsure about.

From Richard Newby’s article “What Happens When Fandom Doesn't Grow Up?”

“If you take a brief perusal of the Twitter reactions to the teaser for the live-action Kim Possible TV movie that Disney Channel released Aug. 10, you'll find plenty of opinions from people upset with the casting, claims it could never live up to the cartoon, or fans hyped with the addendum that ‘this is for us, not the kids.’ These passionate, often volatile responses about a once-popular kids cartoon are overwhelmingly from adults . . . More alarming were male commenters on Twitter photos for the new She-Ra cartoon, noise that basically resulted in a claim that the cartoon character should be ‘hotter’ and closer to the depiction of the character in the 1985 Filmation cartoon.”

          We’re at a really odd place as a society where we’re coming to terms with how we never actually expect ourselves to grow up. In our own way we’re still trying to figure out whether nostalgia--this thing that makes adults parade down the street in colorful spandex, dump their funds into a plushy collection, or spend hours raging online to anyone who suggests that the new Star Wars isn't a sin against the ancestors--is an illness.

        It is somewhat misleading to discuss the nostalgia craze as a phenomenon unique to 21st century audiences. It is widely known, for example, that George Lucas based his two major 80s pop culture contributions, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, on his childhood fascination with B-movies, space operas, serial films, and pulp adventure novels. Still, film studios in the intervening forty years have certainly honed in on this nostalgia market. This landscape of reboots, remakes, and sequels to established properties--including those related to the aforementioned Lucas properties--didn't come from nothing.

    Still, the movies I find most insightful into this scape of nostalgic films are neither remakes nor reboots: 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit directed by Robert Zemeckis and 2019’s Pokemon: Detective Pikachu directed by Rob Letterman.

I highlight these movies because unlike other movies of the modern nostalgia craze (say, a live-action remake of a beloved animated film or a sequel to one of the most influential film sagas of the twentieth-century) they aren't just nostalgic movies, they are movies about nostalgia. They both follow an adult character who gets a lesson in the joys of being a child. The films also bear striking plot similarities to one another, and keying in on the variations offers insights into the thirty years separating the two films. Both films try understanding what it means for adults to engage with their childhood, and there is something revealing about the shared and individual conclusions they arrive at. Mind you, as servants to the capitalist machine that profits off nostalgic consumerism, there are some obvious motivations to their designs that we can probably guess at. 

When I say that these movies reveal something about responsible participation in childhood artifacts, I am not suggesting that audiences would be best served taking their insight at face value. There is a measure of proactivity required in this process, and that's kind of the gist of it: We as audiences will understand that ourselves when we stop trying to escape into childhood and instead be content to learn from it.

Investigating Nostalgia

Laura (1944)

              One reason I wanted to talk about these two movies is that both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (hereafter abbreviated as WFRR and P:DP) are clear throwbacks to the film noir genre popular in the 1940s and 50s. 

             The term "noir" comes from the French word for "black," referring to the black-and-white filming of the genre and the feeling you get watching these movies. In the 1940s, if you didn’t like musicals, you probably liked noir films. Noir films functioned as a release valve for the angst and frustration America accumulated following the devastation of World War II and focused on the seedier side of society or human nature. 

    These films didn’t always have tragic or bitter endings, though they often did, but they always fixated on the darker side of modern existence. Noir films aren’t really made today except in parody or homage like Zootopia, but their impact on cinema is profound. You see their influence in modern films like Nocturnal Animals, Memento, Mystic River, or Night Crawler, but they also heavily informed the development of early New Hollywood films like The Godfather and Chinatown, the latter of which had an especially pronounced influence on WFRR.

No, it was not mandated that these detective characters always have a
cigarette in use, that's just how it always played out

    The archetypal noir film looked something like 1941's The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Peter Lorre. The film sees Bogart playing a private eye who is thrown into a world of turmoil when he investigates the murder of his partner only to be drawn deeper into the criminal underworld when he is caught in a hunt for a priceless figurine. Uncovering the truth behind this rare statuette and its connection to his partner's death has him confronting the outer perimeter of human corruption and evil.

    We see many of these same genre markers in WFRR and P:DP. Jessica Rabbit is basically a parody of the femme fatale trope, and both films follow mysterious crimes and have our main character battered back and forth between multiple untrustworthy sources as they uncover some grand conspiracy. But arguably the most defining feature of noir film isn't any plot device or element, but the tone. Noir film emerged out of a corner of the American psyche that had sort of resigned to the darkness that felt inherent in both the individual and collective society. The choice to use this style of filmmaking as the jumping-off-point for movies about awakening your inner child is striking given how cynical these films were.

    Both movies use a film noir aesthetic because it shorthand communicates a dismal worldview that Eddie and Tim need to be rescued from. And who better to rescue them than childhood-personified cartoons and Pokemon? In the words of Justice Smith, who plays Tim in P:DP, "Because the Pokémon are so fantastical, to put them up against this realistic backdrop makes them pop more. That kind of drew me into wanting to do the film, because you can so easily go into this zany realm." 

           Both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu follow an adult working-class male (Eddie Valiant in WFRR and Tim Goodman in P:DP) who has grown despondent or cold in some way in response to a trauma. They live in a world where Toons and Pokémon live freely among the human population. Our protagonists embody a form of adulthood that just doesn’t have time to play childish games. Tim has long abandoned his ambitions to become a Pokémon trainer, and Eddie hasn’t worked with toons ever since his brother and partner was killed in Toon Town. Their resistance against embracing childhood is framed as a mental block that keeps them from self-actualization.

           Both Eddie and Tim are forced to confront this block when they encounter Roger Rabbit and Pikachu, who function as ambassadors for the childhood icons Eddie and Tim have turned their backs on. Roger is a toon who has been framed for killing a man, and he coaxes Eddie into taking on another case to help toonkind. Pikachu belonged to Tim’s dad, now missing, and is certain he can find him with Tim’s help. Roger and Pikachu’s innate childlikeness, performing impromptu song and dance routines for strangers and entertaining bizarre notions of hope and human goodness, rubs up against Eddie and Tim’s shell of adulthood. But Eddie and Tim both join forces with Roger and Pikachu anyway, and two things happen as a result: One, Eddie and Tim uncover and thwart their respective grand conspiracies, and two,  Eddie and Tim grow into better people as they effectively become children again.  

            Discovering who framed Roger and what happened to Tim’s dad continuously puts Eddie and Tim in positions where they have to break out of their shell of cold hard adulthood and approach situations like kids. One scene in P:DP, for example, has Tim and Pikachu interrogating a Mr. Mime, a Pokémon that speaks only through pantomime. Communicating with it forces Tim to play Mr. Mime’s game of charades. Eventually, Tim beats Mr. Mime at his own game by dowsing him in invisible gasoline and threatening to light him up with invisible fire if he does not cooperate. This is a much cleverer Tim than the Tim we knew at the start, not to mention a more fun Tim. Yes, the films work as a metaphor for embracing one’s inner child, but there are consumerist undertones too that can’t be ignored.

And I somehow got landed with a Magikarp. Don't talk to me!

             The idea isn’t just that Eddie and Tim are becoming better citizens but better consumers. They tried doing the whole adult thing sans nostalgia, but they repent of their sins and vow to always have their cartoons and Pokemon at their side. Disney and Warner Brothers were not ignorant of the real world parallels. They were hoping that audiences would love the films so much that they would come to the theater to see the next Disney animated picture or buy Pokemon Sword & Shield. Heck, audiences for the theatrical release of P:DP were gifted Pokémon trading cards with their purchase.

Movie studios want you to think that you can’t successfully navigate adulthood without your daily intake of vitamin nostalgia. The value of this model to the producers is clear, but what, if anything, does this pilgrimage to childhood offer its adult consumers?

Nostalgia as Medicine

It’s useful to pin down what exactly nostalgia is pitted against in either film. “Adulthood drudgery,” yes, but what specifically? What is nostalgia claiming to save us from, and what does it offer in return?

 A key part of film noir is the frustration over some undefeatable corruption in society or human nature. In classical noir, this often manifests itself in the corruption of the law or capitalism. Both WFRR and P:DP have antagonists who represent higher powers of urbanized society. 

P:DP has industrial titan and political figurehead Howard Clifford manipulating Tim and Pikachu into leading him to the legendary Mewtwo, using the city’s celebration as a front to transform the city’s population into Pokemon. WFRR has Judge Doom using his political and economic power, buying the trolley car and Toon Town, to eliminate the toon population. Both Doom and Clifford represent the unfeeling force of industry as a contrast to the altruistic freedom of childhood innocence embodied by Pokemon or toons. (The films frame them as natural opposites, ignoring the uncomfortable truth that off-screen these symbols of childhood innocence are in fact products of the very industrial empires the film is training us to distrust, but we’ll get to that.)

            Digging deeper into Doom’s plot, in the climax of WFRR Judge Doom proclaims to Eddie, “Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see.” His vision is to pave over nostalgia with convenience. (This itself recalls a fonder vision of the past, remembering the film is set in the 1940s. Doom is prophesying something that has already come to pass for the viewer, both those watching in 1988 and in the modern day.)

            Convenience as an alternative to emotional vulnerability plays a role in Eddie’s character as well, specifically in his alcoholism, something he developed to cope with his brother’s murder. In choosing to bury himself in the drink, Eddie has become cantankerous and ill-tempered and various facets of his personal life, like his romance with barmaid Dolores, have stagnated. Once Eddie becomes involved in the Roger Rabbit case, Eddie gets to start confronting the costs of his emotional baggage.

           At one point, Eddie and Dolores leave Roger hidden in a bar, underestimating his capacity to invent dangerous situations for himself, and return to find the fugitive rabbit performing a vaudevillian song-and-dance routine for the patrons of the bar. Eddie is furious to see Roger risking discovery, and they have the following exchange:

            Roger Rabbit: You don't understand! Those people needed to laugh!

Eddie Valiant: Then when they're done laughing, they'll call the cops! That guy Angelo would rat on you for a nickel.

Roger Rabbit: Not Angelo. He'd never turn me in.

Eddie Valiant: Why? Because you made him laugh?

Roger Rabbit: That's right! A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have!

          Roger’s assessment of human nature proves correct. When Judge Doom and the Weasels come to collect Roger, all the bar patrons, including Angelo, protect Roger. This goes against everything Eddie believes. Eddie thinks people are basically rotten and at the beginning of the film feels only mild discomfort at capturing scandalizing photos of Jessica Rabbit because that’s just how the world is. It takes getting handcuffed to a cartoon character for Eddie to learn to trust the world again. 

          A key beat in his character arc comes when he has to return to Toon Town, the site of his brother’s murder, in order to save Roger. At the gates of the city, he holds a bottle of alcohol in his hand, but rather than indulging in the drink Eddie tosses the bottle and shoots it midair before driving on into Toon Town to rescue Roger. This transformation will come full circle in the climax when Eddie performs his own vaudeville song routine in an attempt to make the weasels laugh themselves to death. Embracing his inner clown like this is a sign of his growth as a character—he’s no longer “a sourpuss, you see.”

       In P:DP, nostalgia is likened unto play or community and contrasted with withdrawal and denial, which itself is associated with overworking. Both Tim and Harry respond to the loss of Tim’s mother by throwing themselves into their work. Like Eddie’s alcohol problem and tainted view of human decency, drowning in work and bills is an easier alternative for Tim and Harry than admitting they need each other.

            Something unique to Tim and Pikachu’s relationship is the parent-child dynamic. We find out that after the enigmatic accident that injured Harry Goodman, Mewtwo allowed Harry’s partner Pikachu to house Harry’s essence in its body to preserve his life force. As Mewtwo tells Tim in the film’s end, “The father you have been looking for has been with you all along.” Nostalgia has been the mutual playing ground through which father and son have reconnected.

            At the film’s climax, Pikachu tells Tim, “I’m sorry I pushed you away when you needed me the most.” This explicitly refers to Pikachu abandoning Tim after thinking he betrayed Harry. Symbolically, though, it offers Harry the chance to apologize for pushing away Tim after Tim’s mother died. Play has been the mediating force through which both parties have rediscovered their need for one another. Making this bid for connection is duly aligned with a childlike perspective: it entails Tim admitting that he still needs his dad, and it forces Harry to confront how merely throwing himself into his work like a good working class man is somehow insufficient.

            This makes an interesting comment on intergenerational nostalgia. After all, the kids who first played Pokemon in 1996 are at a point where they themselves may have kids who are now showing an interest in the same brand they worshipped as a child. Real-world relationships are often strained and sometimes need a mediating force. Sometimes a shared favorite film or another form of media can act as a mutual meeting ground for two members of a strained relationship. In this case, playing together literally heals Tim and Harry’s relationship.

       Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu tell stories of two men who are confronted with how their cold armor of apathy of adulthood is holding them back. Sometimes in our search for maturity, we develop faulty worldviews that weigh us down—such as the idea that people are inherently bad. A number of qualities or worldviews developed in childhood—like giving people the benefit of a doubt—aren’t often encouraged through adulthood. The films aren't wrong for acknowledging that. Would we all be so much worse off if we were all more patient with one another?

But they are happy to leave other facets of the nostalgia conversation unacknowledged. Like how intergenerational nostalgia is essentially breeding bloodlines of fans, constantly producing a crop of customers happy to purchase the new Pokémon game at its release. As audiences become more aware of how bits of childhood can help us in adulthood, studios become more interested in how to put a price on them.

Nostalgia as a Life Vest

There's a little over thirty years separating WFRR and P:DP, and the intervening time has seen a wild turnover in the conversation around things like adult fandom. It's only really recently that we've entered an ecosystem where a show like Stranger Things can become a sort of tentpole of American culture. Historically, being a "nerd" was the highest pejorative in adolescent vernacular. In the late 80s and early 90s when many of these contemporary touchstones emerged, the idea of adults embracing child or child-adjacent properties was looked down on: they were nostalgic in the 18th century sense. This redemption of "the nerd" accounts for possibly the biggest difference between these two films. The toons in WFRR perform a similar function as the Pokemon in P:DP, but they carry very different connotations to the audience receiving them, which you see reflected in the shapes of the conflicts for their individual films.

In WFRR, toons are likened unto real-world exploited classes, vulnerable to the prejudices of the dominating class and the unforgiving whims of economic distress. As Betty Boop tells Eddie, “Work's been kinda slow since cartoons went to color.” More direly, the toons are in danger of being “dipped” out of existence by Judge Doom. In P:DP, the Pokémon become part of a ploy by industry titan Howard Clifford to merge human souls into the bodies of Pokémon. This he does by infecting Pokémon with a gas that causes them to violently attack their trainers and also leaves them vulnerable to merging with humans. In WFRR, Toons are in danger of being erased. In P:DP, the common population is in danger of being overtaken by the Pokémon. This divergence is telling as you consider the social conditions in which both films were made and society's changing attitude toward nostalgia.

        Cartoons in the 1980s were basically an endangered species. Walt Disney Animation was struggling to keep itself afloat, and WFRR’s overwhelming success was not expected. The movie is often discussed in the context of being animation’s dress rehearsal for what would be known as “The Disney Renaissance” of the 1990’s. Disney would follow Who Framed Roger Rabbit the next year with The Little Mermaid, the studio’s biggest critical and commercial success in decades, which would then be followed by hits like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. It was also around this period that home media was introduced to the world, and the animated films from Walt's age could suddenly find their way to your living room. Audiences were only beginning to understand just how much they wanted cartoons in their life.

    Things are different today. Societal turmoil from events like the economic recession of 2008 and 9/11 slammed Americans with an appetite for security, leaving them to return to the comforts of their childhood. This opened the floodgates for today’s influx of remakes, sequels, and reboots. 

        Pokémon today are no endangered species. It’s commonly believed that P:DP was only greenlit in 2016 after the overwhelming success of Pokémon Go! proved that there was still a thriving audience for the brand. Outside of Pokémon, nostalgia is still just as much an influencer in modern pop culture. In fact, one might say that rather than pining for nostalgic content, we are being attacked or consumed by it . . . As I said, the stakes in either film are different, and the differences are very telling.

It would appear that audiences in 1988 listened to Eddie and Roger and opened their hearts to the joy and liberation that comes with childhood, paving the way for Disney’s colossal success in the 1990s and setting the groundwork for their domination today. How interesting is it that the landscape of film today is largely dominated by remakes of the films that premiered on video or in theaters in the wake of WFRR’s pitch for nostalgia? And so here we are again in 2020, we’ve done the nostalgia thing, and now we’re wondering how long we can ride this train before we crash.

Nostalgia as a Crutch

           One thing that separates P:DP from WFRR is that the former actually gives some kind of concession for investing too much into nostalgic artifacts. Clifford’s grand scheme is to impart his own consciousness into a Pokémon, effectively transforming himself into one, so that he never has to face the inevitable deterioration that comes with aging: he’s a ten-year-old kid who never wants to stop playing Pokemon. (And like a ten-year-old, he naturally chooses to transform into Mewtwo.) His plan also entails forcing everyone into the bodies of Pokémon, resulting in a disruption of nature where we are no longer participating in childhood rituals but rather are consumed by them. And so the film adds a caveat that for all the good nostalgia can do for you, too much nostalgia will upset the natural balance. 

         This is simultaneously the most interesting and the most frustrating part of the film.

         “Just don’t give in to nostalgia too much and you’ll be alright,” the film warns, but ... how much is that? The film doesn't take a stance. What exactly is the real-life equivalent of physically transforming into Mewtwo? How many hours a week can a person binge Kim Possible on Disney+ before they’re wasting time? Not “too much.” How much can someone spend on merchandise during their next Disney trip before they’re being careless with their finances? Not “too much.”

Producers of today’s nostalgic content will never put a hard-and-fast line on how much of your money or time you ought to give them. They’ll only tell you that you could be doing worse, but you’re not so don’t worry about it! The film can then claim to be representing the issue responsibly, but by holding the audience’s hand through an imagined scenario with no clear real-world equivalent, the films deter the audience from questioning their own indulgences.

Jason Sperb, author of Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema, describes this pattern in recent films:

“Certainly the use of movies to promote toys is nothing particularly remarkable in and of itself. Since the earliest days of Disney’s cross-market success, and later refined in the wake of the original Star Wars’ lucrative toy market, it has been assumed that any new kids’ movie is simultaneously an advertisement for the new line of toys (and clothes, soundtracks, and various products ad infinitum) that comes with it. What makes movies such as Wall-E and The Lego 
Movie particularly frustrating is how the critique of overconsumption disingenuously reinforces said behavior then further validates it by suggesting that as long as we are aware of such dangerous practices in others, we will somehow avoid it in an imagined world of ‘responsible’ consumerism—in a culture generally dominated by anything but restrained consumption habits and further enabled by a rhetoric of participation.”

       This isn’t exactly unique to P:DP, but it is somewhat unique to modern films dealing with nostalgia. We didn’t see this scarecrow of a villain in WFRR, and I suspect a large part of that comes down to the fact that 1988 audiences were not particularly insecure about drowning in nostalgia as its involvement with media was much milder. Audiences today are growing more uneasy about just how insidious this nostalgia game actually is and how much they should be investing in it, and so film producers are working harder to alleviate these fears with built-in defense mechanisms.

Returning to Hofer’s observation, we start to see where nostalgia might still act like an ailment and where this business model starts to feel a little crooked. Producers would have you buying Pokemon cards with your child's college fund in the name of seeking childhood security. That security will never come, but the bills will. The real undefeatable corruption in these noir films might be the one off screen, the one perpetuating emotional dependence on 2-3 new Marvel films a year.

Going Home Again

      The emotional refuge of nostalgia will always be inextricably connected with the consumerist processes that produced it. Though the nostalgic nirvana we feel watching The Mandalorian feels like a heavenly offering that glided from on high down a pillar of celestial light, someone in a business suit used a graph to calculate how to produce that feeling in you so you would subscribe to Disney+. There are worse ways to spend money, but there’s a fine, fine line between a splash in the healing waters of nostalgia and making our bed in it. Dare I say, more of us are pruney with nostalgia than we want to admit.

    The good news is we as media consumers have some agency in the process, in what or how much of this media we consume and in how we decide to contextualize it. When understood properly, movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu will enable audiences not to make their home in Neverland but to live in adulthood more enthusiastically.    

In making room for childhood, Eddie and Tim don’t become kids again—they become better adults. They both still have responsibilities and careers (even if Tim’s new job is slightly more fun than what he had at the start). They find release not in regressing to a less stressful point in time, but in carrying the best parts of childhood with them. They become more creative, more empathetic, and more daring. In trying to figure out what healthy nostalgia looks like, we can take a page from that book.

           Whether or not our nostalgia becomes an "affliction" will come down to whether we allow ourselves to become better people or if we just drown ourselves in funko-pop dolls. Often we can find this more productive gratification by doing small things: deliberately engaging in conversation with coworkers, setting aside time to master a new skill, and so on. I myself would be in denial if I did not acknowledge how my passion for film studies was in large part a product of my enthusiasm for the Disney films I loved as a child. 

             Mindfully engaging with childhood is hard because it asks us to do more than just buy a new toy. Once we stop trying to use Pikachu as a therapist we are more able to progress emotionally. Moreover, these nostalgic ventures actually become enjoyable again and we can engage with them in ways that are kinder to our psyche and our wallets. Go to Disneyland because it’s nice spending time in a place so focused on happiness, not because you have no other means of self-soothing.

            Many of us felt less encumbered as children, but we were also more creative, more kind, more daring, and more interested in making people happy. We need to find refuge in childhood ideals, not childhood products. Allow me to propose a simple, if unscientific, litmus test: if nostalgia is bringing a little more kindness, creativity, and boldness into your life, then sure, after you’ve paid your bills and the kids are in bed, spend a minute or two training up your Charmander. If you don’t know what political candidate even interests you in the upcoming election, maybe put the Gameboy down for a spell and do something that scares you. No amount of toys can stop us from growing up, but a little bit of childhood spirit can keep us from standing still.
                                                                                      -The Professor