The reviews are warm and largely agree on why. Almost every critic starts with the technical achievement: the mixing of live action and hand-drawn animation, which most describe as faultless and several as a marvel, with the cartoon characters seeming to share the frame on their own terms. Bob Hoskins is the performance most often singled out, credited with making the hybrid believable by playing straight against stand-ins and empty air. Kathleen Turner’s Jessica Rabbit and Christopher Lloyd also draw praise.
The reservations gather around the story. The New Yorker admires the engineering but finds the film a trivial folly that labours for a joy it rarely reaches, and Variety thinks the plot amounts to inspired silliness about the film business. Later retrospectives are gentler, though one or two find the noir plotting predictable and the slapstick over the top. The spread is otherwise narrow: nobody dislikes it, and even the doubters concede the craft.