Word: crumbs
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...Robert Crumb is a kind of American Hogarth, a moralist with a blown mind. The gallery he has created in underground comic books-from the gnomic sage Mr. Natural, the Priapus of the Midwest, through such creatures as Angelfood McSpade to that morsel of 13-year-old jailbait, Honeybunch Kaminski-constitutes Head City's sharpest and funniest view of American life. And perhaps the most pornographic. His fantasy unchecked by the strictures of mass circulation, Crumb gave back to cartooning the scatological vigor and erotic exuberance it had during the Regency, and then some...
...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...
Despite the fuzziness and fumblings, Fritz the Cat brings Crumb's figures to the screen in most of their full lewd-ness--which is finally why you pay your roll of nickels Th-th-that's all...Fucks...