Wednesday Double Feature – The Adult Cartoon of Ralph Bakshi
Recently occurred to me that despite having watched Wizards, Lord of the Rings, Cool World, and the Mighty Mouse cartoon show, I have never watched any of the animated films that Ralph Baksh built his reputation on… You know… Adult cartoons.
Over the years, my opinion of adult cartoons has changed. While it’s something I would have leaped at in adolescence, after a while it seems that sex and violence in films for their own sake is the slightly more grown-up version of all the ice cream you can eat. That’s not adult, that’s juvenile! So, I thought I’d try and get past all of that and look at Bakshi’s art.
The first film on our list is Bakshi’s adoption of Robert Crumb’s Fritz The Cat. In the 1960s New York, Fritz is a student, poets, and idealist. In reality, he just a poser who uses his political philosophy as a way to pick up chicks, stumbling through one disaster after another.
Once you get past the shock value, this film was… Okay. I like Crumb’s original designs with a stark pallet of dark primary colors. The backgrounds are done in a pen and ink colored in watercolor, giving the film, as a whole, a wonderfully unique look.
I have mixed feelings about the narrative. The plot was all over the place, to the point it’s easier to look at it as the sum as a collection of scenes, with some scenes being much better than others. All in all, while I’m glad this was done, I just don’t believe the experiment was a success.
Still, it led the way to better things.
The next film on my list, Heavy Traffic, tells the story of Cartoonists Michael and his girlfriend Carole as they try to survive life in the big city. Like Fritz, this felt like it was all over the place and once again felt like a collection of shorts that couldn’t decide whether they were being brutally realistic or over the top surrealism. These vignettes tied together to create its own story. At the same time, this is very much felt as if it was Bakshi’s personal vision with his own designs and his own look for the film. My favorite being Carole herself who dominates every scene she’s in.
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