Word: bakshi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed and Written by RALPH BAKSHI...
Abortive Attempt. The film is a blend of animation and live action. Like Director Bakshi's previous inexplicable successes, Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, the movie labors under the delusion that outrageousness is a synonym for wit, ugliness of line and color a form of style, crudeness a necessary ingredient of vitality...
...Bakshi had any genuine skill as a satirist or draftsman, these spiritual descendants of the Uncle Remus characters might have become participants in the sort of Swiftian drama he apparently intended. There are hints here and there of a desire to demonstrate that black street styles are not stereotypes at all but put-ons. Such disguises can-sometimes-help individuals to get at least some of what they want with out permitting a hostile world to know that they are trying. Bakshi's sensibility is too vulgar for such an exercise. With a newspaper storm breaking around...
...exhibit now under consideration represents something of a curiosity: a rip-off of a ripoff. It will be remembered that the original cartoon feature Fritz the Cat - largely the work of the animator Ralph Bakshi - so enraged Fritz's creator, the underground comic artist R. Crumb, that he disowned the whole movie. Crumb, a stringent satirist, had conjured up Fritz as a way to mock the poses of the pseudo hipster and to lay waste the giddy excess of the culture from which he sprang. Bakshi slicked Fritz up, cooled him out, and turned him into the perfect creature...
...along comes Steve Krantz, producer of Fritz and likewise of this sequel - as squalid and witless an assembly of animation as could be imagined. By comparison, the Bakshi version looks like Fantasia. To escape the shrill accusations of his wife, Fritz drifts off into cannabis reveries where his libido can run unchecked and where his paranoia eventually assumes control. He idles back to the high-stepping 1930s, then works his way up to the present and a visit with a Bowery bum, whom he accidentally immolates. In the film's most elaborate episode, he eases himself off into...