Word: bakshis
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Written and directed by RALPH BAKSHI...
...kind of animated cartoon Ralph Bakshi has made of Crumb's world is something else again. Fritz, the hero, is what the average campus revolutionary was in the late '60s-a fool tabby, living off vicarious experience, with his head full of windy sub-Marcusian rhetoric and only one ambition: to swive. Fritz gets involved in a hilarious orgy in a Village bathtub, is nearly busted by two cops, drawn inevitably as pigs, takes off to Harlem after an interminable chase through a synagogue, and is turned on to grass. Stoned, he makes inadequate love to a blimplike...
...Bakshi's animation is good, and the visuals-which marvelously capture the grainy, lowering look of the Manhattan streetscape-are raucous, ingenious and convincing. But Fritz the Cat is, for a cartoon, exasperatingly slow: Bakshi's sense of pace and editing is snail-like, and the dialogue mostly naive and muffled. Moreover, the characters are so ill-defined that Fritz's relation to them becomes incomprehensible-a sad defect for a movie that should have been as crisp and schematic as a puppet show. The voice-over acting constantly hovers just below the threshold of competence...
...greet Fritz as a masterpiece of satire, or even as a significant voice from the counterculture, is wishful thinking: Bakshi seems to have been as unsure of his targets as Fritz himself. The '60s, in all their wide-open absurdities, still demand a more pointed epitaph than this. It will come as no surprise to head comic fans to learn that, on seeing what became of Fritz in the film, Crumb asked to have his name removed from all publicity. Meanwhile, the movie, largely because of Fritz's bathtub scene, got an X rating, something of a coup...
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...