TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy, Science Fiction, Animation, Drama, Sci-Fi Comedy, Americana, Fantasy, Holiday Film, Teen Movie, Thriller, Period Film, Fantasy Comedy
Key Collaborators: Alan Silvestri (Composer), Steve Starkey (Producer), Arthur Schmidt (Editor), Don Burgess (Cinematographer), Rick Carter (Production Designer), Dean Cundey (Cinematographer), Bob Gale (Screenwriter), Jeremiah O'Driscoll (Editor), Christopher Lloyd (Leading Actor), Bob Gale (Producer), Jack Rapke (Producer), Wendie Jo Sperber (Character Actress)

"Zemeckis’s work has been much celebrated for its dazzling technological inventiveness, and then pretty much left at that. While his films are technically impressive, they are also more than that. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? does indeed blend animation with live action brilliantly, but that observation does not exhaust the film. Zemeckis, in all his work, also chooses narratives that work out conflicts arising from a complex dual structure, elicits a fondness for injecting his films with both a serious moral undertone and black comedy, and puts forth a carefully controlled kinetic sense that works both to hold these movies together and to keep them extraordinarily dynamic." - Mark Walker (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"Robert Zemeckis is slick, commercial, unfailingly on target. He makes movies, not films. More cash cow than artiste, Zemeckis has surpassed even Steven Spielberg on occasion in his ability to produce the "right" sensational blockbuster. Zemeckis is the personification of what, for most people, Hollywood means." - The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, 2004

"No other contemporary director has used special effects to more dramatic and narrative purpose. Grant the lapse of Back to the Future II (a mere marking time) and the miscalculation of Death Becomes Her, and Zemeckis has done nothing that is not fresh, startling, difficult, and intriguing. In partnership with his cowriter, Robert Gale, he has taken movies into fascinating realms of what might be—the fusion of live action and cartoon, the overlay of past and future, and most recently the dynamic engineering of cosmetics." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Action fantasy has been the keynote to success for this American director, most of whose latter-day films have been in the blockbuster vein. In 1994, he crowned a spectacular run of success by winning an Academy Award as Best Director for Forrest Gump." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)

"Zemeckis' best films (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the Back to the Future trilogy and Death Becomes Her) are flights of imagination into the impossible, revelling in complex narrative conundrums and frantic, slapsticky action; in the later Forrest Gump and Contact, his special effects remained impressive, but the strenuous pretensions to political/philosophical significance were melodramatic and contrived. His virtues are those of a comic-strip artist: vivid characterisation, pacy action, and a forthright, faintly lurid, relentlessly inventive visual style that manages to merge conventional movie 'reality' and feverish fantasy." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"Robert Zemeckis's films - including Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and Forrest Gump (1994) - are a curious synthesis of old-fashioned sentiment and cutting-edge technology. But recently, as his fascination with the reality-altering properties of CGI has grown, Zemeckis increasingly resembles the cliché of the obsessive scientist defying nature at his peril." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)