Word: cartoon
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...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...
...Libertine, "Makes Hugh Hefner's Playboy Penthouse look like a nursery school," says ABC-TV. 100 Baker, HBS. 7, 8:30, May 22-23. With a Roadrunner cartoon...
After a rather tepid Krazy Kat cartoon and a razzle-dazzle rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that shouldn't be missed--technicolor psychedelics, sing-along sub-titles, and a flag with the wrong number of stars--we arrive in the Big City, which is probably Los Angeles but could be anyplace. Here the Tramp criss-crosses paths with the beautiful girl and the eccentric millionaire. She thinks that Chaplin must be wealthy as well as kind--after all, she's heard him getting out of a limousine. Smitten by love, he can't bring himself to explain that...
...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...