Word: cartoons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Apes (1971), have already taken in $135 million at box offices round the world and become the objects of a minor cult. Next month. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes will find a huge readymade audience of ape addicts, including many intellectuals who enjoy the series' broad, cartoon-like satire of human faults. Keeping both the cultists and drive-in trade happy has taxed the ingenuity of the creators. The second film was planned as the finale, says Scriptwriter Paul Dehn, and "they told me to destroy not only the entire cast but the entire world, which...
...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...
...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 for the animated cartoon, the last bastion of pudency...
Died. Frank Tashlin, 59, Hollywood director who built his career on the sight gag and slapstick chase; of a heart attack; in Beverly Hills, Calif. Originally a cartoon animator, Tashlin graduated to comedy writing in the 1930s and '40s, and to directing in the '50s (The Glass Bottom Boat, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter...