Word: bakshi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cartoonist Ralph Bakshi softens up the story. He makes Fritz into a harmless NYU romantic, circa 1967. (The date is a needless hedge, and a more potent campus might have made Fritz dangerous.) This doesn't work for much of Fritz: under Crumb lies agony, under Bakshi gas. The screen Fritz enacts the essential Crumb pose of a phony out for pleasure under moralistic guises. He sees through all the other phonies and beats them at their game by living out his fantasies in fact. But this Fritz is enveloped with his animator's love (he's even cuter facially...
...BAKSHI has picked a perfect locale to set the film's first third. From MacDougall to St. Mark's, from Washington Square to the Lower East Side... are the spots where high school girls go for experience, and college jazz artists (and sometimes real musicians) give it to them. Here also lies the East Coast seedbed of escapist counter-culturism and intellectual voyeurism--fit for an Abbie Hoffman (remember Abbie?) even more than for a Fritz. If Bakshi, unlike Crumb, speaks from such a milieu's heart, still that milieu indicts itself...
...fanfared social jibes don't emerge from essential themes, (there are none), but from the droppings of Crumb's bathroom wit that Bakshi slaps into his narrative. (A Ph.d. candidate will someday call Fritz 'picaresque'). Fritz's black-talking, muscle flexing crow friends are the natural men of his world, though Fritz himself is far from psychotically WASP-ish. All the traditional Americans--pig cops and hardhats and a hound dirt-farmer--are sweating ignoramuses so whacked-out by work that they can't ever get it together. Radical politicos and Hell's Angels join paws in the headiest...
Cartoon-qua-cartoon, Fritz The Cat isn't much. The good scenes (there are plenty) come straight out of Crumb, while the Bakshi-formed transitions are usually banal. (Bakshi can't cut to save his life within scenes either.) The voices are fine, the music jaunty, and at one point--when Billie Holiday is heard singing "Yesterdays"--the soundtrack gets beautiful. The color is gloriously trashy, but Bakshi lingers on his settings at ridiculous length...