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Title: A modernist, anti-HUAC film noir classic.
Review: Zemeckis' masterwork boasts all the requirements of film noir - loser detective, femme fatale, patsy, shadowy noir look, corrupt big business interests etc. - and is yet really an anti-noir: the negative stereotypes and expectations are reversed; the dissolution of boundaries and the breakdown of reason, so traumatic in noir, is here celebrated.This is the work of the animation half, a genre hostile to boundaries and reason, even if the thriller plot here means it is not quite as liberated as the average Looney Toon. Not only is this possibly the first blockbuster film to allude to Joyce's 'Ulysses' (the Toon Town/Night Town sequence), but it is also an allegory of the McCarthy era, reminding us how animation bravely protested when live action kept ingloriously schtum.
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