Cast:
Skip Hinnant (Fritz the Cat), Rosetta LeNoire (Bertha / Additional voices), John McCurry (Blue / John), Judy Engles (Winston Schwartz / Lizard Leader), Phil Seuling (Ralph / Additional voices), Ralph Bakshi (Al / Narrator), Mary Dean (Charlene / Dee Dee / Sorority Girls / Harriet), and Charles Spidar (Bar Patron / Duke the Crow) Directed by Ralph Bakshi (#475 - Wizards)
Review:
"My approach to animation as a director is live action. I don't approach it in the traditional animation ways. None of our characters get up and sing, because that's not the type of picture I'm trying to do. I want people to believe my characters are real, and it's hard to believe they're real if they start walking down the street singing."
You know, I ought to give adult animation a bit more of a chance. More specifically, I should give a further spotlight to Ralph Bakshi by starting at the beginning. Bakshi was born in the city of Haifa in what was once known as the British Mandate of Palestine to a Jewish family that soon migrated to the United States that saw him raised in Brooklyn. He graduated from the High School of Art and Design in 1956, a vocational school for commercial artists. He started work with Terrytoons that saw him eventually go from cel polishing to creative director by the time of the mid-1960s. He was briefly appointed the head of the department at Paramount's animation studio before he formed his own production company with Steve Krantz in 1968. Enter R. Crumb (as generally signed on his work, although obviously his real name is Robert). Having an interest in comics and drawing from a young age, Crumb was actually a novelty greeting card artist for several years before his interest in cartooning led to a variety of work published on and off (with a chunk done prior to taking LSD). Needless to say, there was quite an interest in the material often called part of the "underground comix". Fritz the Cat was something that he drew from a young age (the Crumb brothers tried doing their own comics for others to read when Robert was 15) which went from being inspired by the family cat to featuring talking animals doing, well, explicit things that formally entered the (comix) scene in 1965. Anyway, Krantz and Bakshi found interest in making a film based on a collection of strips that Crumb had done after being told by Krantz that the film he wanted to do (based on Bakshi's own upbringing in inner-city street life) wouldn't be able to be done for studios due to its content and lack of directorial experience on Bakshi's part. The perception of sharp satire in Crumb's work and similarities to Bakshi's own interests got him on the push to do a film that eventually got some sort of approval to go forward (or whatever). The film was rejected by every major studio, most notably with Warner Bros. Cinemation Industries would eventually distribute the film, one that became the first animated feature to be given the X rating and a hit with audiences not always seen with independent features. Krantz and Bakshi worked together on Heavy Traffic the year after the release of Fritz; probably as a result of the director asking for why he hadn't been paid for the success of Fritz, they didn't work with each other again. Krantz would produce a second feature that retained the services of Hinnant as the lead voice but not Bakshi. Released in 1974, the R-rated The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat went over with mediocre (read: mild) reception. Once described as an "iconoclast" of animation, Bakshi would direct eight further films with varying levels of creative control that culminated with Cool World (1992), although he still does art even in his mid-eighties.
To be clear, this wasn't the first adult animated feature, as evidenced by the Animerama trilogy (A Thousand and One Nights / Cleopatra / Belladonna of Sadness) that started in 1969, and I'm sure there are other examples to note for shorts in the first half of the 20th century. But one has to start somewhere with covering fascinating jumbles of film. Various location photographs were taken for backgrounds that were then traced over for a film that used a handful of material as written by Crumb to go with a "sort of a stream of consciousness" in terms of not having many pencil tests. To put it mildly, the film of Fritz the Cat is what one makes of its title character. Bakshi once labeled the title character a "phony". Crumb and Bakshi have differing accounts of, well, pick a topic relating to its production. Crumb decided to kill off Fritz in a September 1972 comic while making fun of Bakshi and Krantz (evidently this irritation is long-lasting, as evidenced by a 2015 drawing Crumb made of a hairy butt that was depicted as a depiction of "Mohamid Bakshi", while Bakshi once called Crumb a "slick hustler"); food for thought: is the last act when it comes to dialogue for its title character that invokes a Beatles song really the type of thing to say is "red-neck and fascistic"? The answer is somewhere in the middle: it is a mess of a movie that is hit and miss with its humor that jumps around more often than the animation when it comes to essentially being a splatter painted rendition of someone trying to remember the sixties. The animation was done by various people (such as Ted Bonnicksen, who apparently took his assignment home to work on while suffering from leukemia) that came and went while Bakshi professed an aim for an animation that wants to be "live-action" in approach rather than that sort of "realistic" aimed by certain Disney productions of the time, one where adult animation would be "the right to animate any subject or idea you have and let the rating fall where they may" as opposed to just being, shall we say, "jiggle television" for 78 minutes.
Interestingly enough, Hinnant was a performer on the PBS program The Electric Company in the year prior to the release of this film (apparently, he had a "naturally phony" voice that appealed to Bakshi). Of course, when you have a list of voices that range from TV presences in LeNoire to the director himself to "comic fan convention and distributor" (no I am not joking), it is no wonder that a good deal of the recorded dialogue is a mix of stuff recorded on the streets of New York City or involve recording others in conversation (such as the scene in a Harlem bar or with the rabbis). Hinnant and his glib nature work in the strangest of ways that make one look within when it comes to his puddle of morals to go for escapes of the most ridiculous and yet most relatable of escapades. Sure, none of us may get involved in an orgy, but I think we all deal at least once with getting too wrapped up in ourselves (whether or not one is a "leftist" or not) or taking things way too seriously, and Hinnant carries the film to worthwhile astonishment. The other voices come and go to occasional amusing notes, such as the silly first exchange that comes from the cop characters (take one guess what animal they are). It is a sea of hypocrisy and noise that seems about right in bad taste that is not quite a great movie but instead one that is a lightning rod for others to take hold and strike their own path for animated ventures. In the long run, well, Crumb thought the film was a reflection of the director's "confusion" that seemed to him to have "real repressed horniness", while Bakshi had the feeling (back in 1972) that it was both the best thing to happen in his life and the thing that helped him understand "what's locked up inside". So yes, Bakshi made a film that got him on the path to making adult animation get to a path to eventually lead to further boundary-pushing and also got to have a lengthy enmity with a comic artist (picking a side is far less amusing than noting the fact that both benefitted from the other) that is probably almost as amusing as the film itself. It is a lovely crude mess of a movie that really is a case of one drawing what they want to draw. Far from a masterpiece but far from a tryhard film, Fritz the Cat is the ultimate curiosity in potential meeting with reality that is different to any viewer when it comes to absorbing the sights that the film has to offer.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
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