Heavy Traffic (1973)

          Inspired by the street life and the African-American culture to which animator Ralph Bakshi was exposed during his childhood and adolescence, the X-rated cartoon Heavy Traffic offers a statement of sorts. It’s personal and unique, but it’s also disjointed, excessive, loud, and vulgar, a phantasmagoria set in the gutter. Bakshi threads a semiautobiographical narrative through the picture, tracking the adventures of a 22-year-old cartoonist encountering the world of sex for the first time, while subplots touch on miscegenation, racism, and violence. Yet for much of its running time, Heavy Traffic is as freeform as a jazz solo, jumping and diving and grooving through a bizarre amalgam of brash sounds and provocative imagery. One gets the sense of Bakshi sawing open his head and pouring the contents onto the screen.

          There’s something unquestionably thrilling about watching a gifted artist speak this directly and openly to his audience. Alas, there’s also something to be said for restraint and structure, two things this film almost completely lacks. Because it’s such an individualistic statement, Heavy Traffic can’t rightly be described as a mess; better to say that Bakshi felt compelled to make certain things accessible to viewers and did not feel so compelled to translate other things out of his own private language. In sum, make of Heavy Traffic what you will.

          The core storyline follows Michael Corleone—yes, the same name as the protagonist of The Godfather (1971)—as he trudges through the brutality and grime of a New York City that seems to exist out of time. Some signifiers suggest the ’50s of Bakshi’s youth, while others seem pulled from the ’70s. Michael lives with his oppressive Jewish mother and his philandering Italian father, who constantly fight with weapons as well as words. (In one scene, Mom throws a cleaver at Dad’s crotch.) Through circumstance, Michael becomes involved with Carole, an African-American bartender in a dive bar, so Michael’s father goes mad over the thought of his son bedding a black woman. The father even tries to order a Mob hit on his own son. Meanwhile, Carole and Michael hatch a scheme to leave New York for California so he can pursue his dream of becoming an animator.

          Dancing around this linear narrative are myriad running gags and visual tropes, including live-action shots of an actor playing Michael while he operates a pinball machine. (Close-ups of balls bouncing around inside the machines serve as a recurring metaphor representing, one assumes, the vagaries of fate.) If the preceding description makes Heavy Traffic sound straightforward, rest assured it is not. Bakshi takes most scenes into risqué territory by explicitly animating sex and violence. Heavy Traffic may well contain more cartoon penises than any other film, and other startling images include slow-motion gore (e.g., a bullet exploding a character’s skull), as well as various excretory functions. One scene features a drunken stud making out with a dancing girl until exclaiming, “This broad’s got a hard-on!” The stud reacts to his discovery by pummeling his transvestite playmate nearly to death. Other noteworthy moments include the requisite offensive religious scene, with a bloody Christ stepping off the cross, and a black-and-white cartoon-within-a-cartoon depicting a character beating people with his phallus, which is as large as his entire torso.

          Clearly, Bakshi worked through some stuff while making Heavy Traffic, which he began developing well before his breakout hit, Fritz the Cat (1972), and then returned to after the success of Fritz the Cat gave him cachet.

Heavy Traffic: FREAKY

Coonskin (1975)

          Featuring an outrageous barrage of images, themes, and words about race, the animation/live-action hybrid Coonskin is among the most incendiary products of the blaxploitation era. A casual viewer stumbling onto any part of the film would probably find the material shockingly racist, and the reaction would be compounded by the discovery that Coonskin was written and directed by a white man. Taken in context, however, Coonskin is a deeply complicated piece of work. Part satire and part tragedy, it’s a sexualized and violent phantasmagoria about the cancerous reach of racism. The question of whether filmmaker Ralph Bakshi justifies his extremes by placing his work into a sociopolitical framework is one that each individual viewer must explore, because the content of Coonskin is deliberately offensive. By presenting grotesque caricatures of African-Americans, gays, Italians, Jews, rednecks, women, and so on, Bakski tries to confront small-minded attitudes. Yet in so doing, he unavoidably perpetuates stereotypes. Some influencers in the African-American community have embraced the movie over the years, while many others have vilified the piece as the cinematic equivalent of a hate crime.

           Coonsin opens with a series of vignettes. First, two animated characters, both African-American dudes dressed like pimps, appear over a live-action background to deliver a volley of angry humor. (The first line of dialogue is “Fuck you!”) Next, actor/singer Scatman Crothers appears onscreen to perform a jive-talkin’ ditty about the troubles of being a “nigger man” while the opening credits appear. Finally, the story proper begins, with two black convicts, Pappy (Crothers) and Randy (Philip Michael Thomas), prepping for a prison break in a live-action sequence. While the inmates hide from guards, Pappy tells Randy a fable that Bakshi illustrates with animated sequences. The fable involves three black men—Brother Bear (voiced by Barry White), Brother Rabbit (voiced by Thomas), and Preacher Fox (Charles Gordone)—getting into hassles with the law down south. Soon, the group heads for Harlem, where Brother Rabbit kills a high-powered gangster and takes over the criminal’s operation. As Brother Rabbit rises to power, he and his friends get into hassles with corrupt cops, manipulative prostitutes, and vengeful mobsters, among others. Lots of animated bloodshed and sex ensues.

          Many scenes blend cartoons and live-action images within the same frame—Bakshi recruited ace Hollywood cinematographer William A. Fraker to shoot the live-action material, and Fraker provides an appropriately gritty look. Long stretches of Coonskin are surrealistic, with Bakshi embarking on flights of artistic fancy. A woman turns into a butterfly. A deceased fat man gets buried, but his body parts keep popping up through the dirt of the grave, as if the earth can’t contain his girth. A voluptuous streetwalker wearing an American-flag costume blows away a horny guy by using the cannon hidden in her crotch. Concurrently, the race-themed dialogue goes as far over the top as the animation does. “I’m tired of trying to segregate, integrate, and masturbate!” “I sees you, Lord, and you fuckin’ well better see me!” “Killin’ crackers, I guess that’s cool!” Even the religious material is inflammatory. A 300-pound preacher calling himself “Black Jesus” performs in front of his flock while nude, his junk flailing to and fro, and another preacher uses the gospel as a come-on to lure a man into a brothel. When Bakshi opens fire with his satirical machine gun, no one escapes unharmed.

          In many ways, Coonskin is deeply alive, with creativity and indignation and passion powering every frame. And yet the movie is also a mess, with herky-jerky storytelling, potshots at easy targets, and underdeveloped characters. It’s more of an experience than a proper movie. Is the experience worthwhile? For some viewers, the answer to that question will be a resounding yes, because Coonskin gives it to bigots with both barrels. However, the disjointed, grotesque, and juvenile aspects of the movie are big turnoffs for those who expect their sociopolitical discussions to unfold on a higher plane. By any regard, Coonskin is Bakshi’s boldest movie, which is saying a lot seeing as how he made the world’s first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat (1972).

Coonskin: FREAKY

Wizards (1977)

          The weirdest thing about Wizards is that the movie isn’t particularly weird. After all, the animated adventure was the first full-on fantasy film from maverick animator Ralph Bakshi, who made his mark with the X-rated cartoon feature Fritz the Cat (1972). Yet for this project, which is a hybrid of Tolkein-esque medieval/magic tropes and ecologically themed sci-fi, Bakshi mostly dialed back on the provocation and concentrated on spinning a yarn. Unfortunately, the yarn isn’t very good.

          In the distant future, after man has turned Earth into a wasteland, two sibling wizards—good Avatar (voiced by Bob Holt) and evil Blackwolf (voiced by Steve Gravers)—battle for control. Avatar’s all about nature, since he’s a mellow little dude who lives in a castle with a sexy faerie, whereas Blackwolf is a demonic-looking creature ruling an army of hell-spawned monsters, homicidal robots, and killer mutants. The bulk of the story depicts Avatar’s difficult trek from his castle to Blackwolf’s lair for a final standoff, and a major subplot involves Avatar’s conversion of one of Blackwolf’s assassins—a robot whom Avatar captures and renames “Peace” (voiced by David Proval)—into a soldier for good.

          This is all exactly as heavy-handed as it sounds, though the hipster prism through which Bakshi tells his tale makes the movie a bit more palatable than it might have otherwise. For instance, Avatar is prone to saying things like “this has been the biggest bummer trip I’ve ever been on.” He’s an appealing character, even though his attitude and lingo now seem dated.

          Bakshi employs the crude but innovative animation techniques that were his ’70s signature, occasionally sprucing up traditional cel-animation shots with trippy backgrounds that are generated by optical effects. He also spotlights herky-jerky images created by filming real actors and then tracing their basic shapes onto film frames to provide an effect akin to moving silhouettes. (During the picture’s climax, Bakshi takes the experiment further by integrating live-action footage, cutting to real shots of airplanes and tanks while Avatar’s army tangles with Blackwolf’s forces.) The oddest—and least effective—of Bakshi’s gimmicks involves cutting to montages of still drawings for transitional moments. As an uncredited Susan Tyrell soberly intones expositional voiceover, renderings by comic-book/magazine artist Mike Ploog depict scenes that Bakshi didn’t bother to animate. In addition to slowing down the action, these transitional moments make the rest of the movie look crappy by comparison, since Ploog’s drawings are beautifully detailed.

          Another significant problem with Wizards is that Bakshi, who also wrote and produced the film, can’t decide on a consistent tone—the movie lurches back and forth between action and slapstick and social commentary. In short, it’s a mess. Still, every so often Bakshi’s mad-scientist approach results in something exciting or funny or touching, and the one thing the movie can’t be said to lack is imagination.

Wizards: FUNKY

The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

          Even though Hammer Films’ long-running horror series were never big on continuity, it was a bummer whenever series entries were missing their regular stars. Thus, one of the many reasons The Horror of Frankenstein is so disposable is that Ralph Bates plays the titular mad scientist instead of Peter Cushing. It’s not that Bates is bad in the movie—quite to the contrary, he’s got a light touch for deranged perversity that suits Hammer’s campy style. However, the presence of Cushing in Hammer’s other Frankenstein pictures creates the illusion of a series that’s progressing forward, even though the movies are highly repetitive, simply because Cushing’s performance gets more intense in each successive film.

          Conversely, The Horror of Frankenstein represents pure narrative backsliding, because it’s a retread of the series’ first entry, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957); as in that picture, brilliant but reckless young doctor Victor Frankenstein tests his theories about the nature of human life by building a monster from pieces of corpses, only to see the monster escape the confines of Castle Frankenstein and murder unsuspecting villagers in the generic European countryside. Yes, it’s once more into the origin-story breach of Gothic production design, grubby henchmen, heaving bosoms, and over-the-top Technicolor gore.

          The specifics of the plot don’t merit recounting, since the storyline is just a mishmash of things you’ve seen a zillion times before, so only the movie’s few novel touches are worth mentioning. As directed and co-written by Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, The Horror of Frankenstein tries to send up the series at the same time it delivers monster-movie thrills, so Bates gets to riff on the idea of doctor-as-deviant, and his grave robbers of choice are an amiable husband-and-wife team (he cuts up the bodies, she does all the digging). The movie’s monster is a big letdown, however, because he looks more silly than scary. As played by Darth Vader himself, British bodybuilder David Prowse, the monster looks like a Muscle Beach escapee in a Halloween costume, with a cheesy rubber skullcap and gauze-bandage bike shorts. So, while The Horror of Frankenstein has some meager redeeming values, the movie itself is like the monster—a patchwork of used parts artificially animated to something that fleetingly resembles life.

The Horror of Frankenstein: LAME

Fritz the Cat (1972) & The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974)

          One of those notorious movies whose cultural significance remains obvious years after its initial release but whose entertainment value does not, Fritz the Cat enjoys a number of peculiar distinctions. Among other things, it was the first X-rated cartoon, and it eventually became the most successful independent animated feature of all time. Based on the work of underground comics icon R. Crumb, Fritz the Cat is a deliberately vulgar comedy that lampoons many of the prevalent attitudes of the 1960s, taking equal pains to skewer pretentious hippies and close-minded Establishment types. That all of this takes the shape of a talking-animal movie is simply the most obvious way in which Fritz the Cat is gleefully perverse; truly, images like the film’s opening vignette of a construction worker whipping out his schvantz to urinate on a passing hippie would have been startling in any format.

          Even with its wall-to-wall outrageousness, however, Fritz the Cat hasn’t aged well. The intentionally crude animation isn’t the problem, since it’s as clear today as it was in 1972 that writer-director Ralph Bakshi was trying to get as far away from the cuddly comforts of Disney cartoons as possible, giving his raucous flick the grimy quality of a cheaply mimeographed underground ’zine. The problem, or at least one of them, is the stream-of-consciousness storytelling, which jumbles everything from loose rap sessions to carefully staged slapstick bits, with more than a fair share of puerile X-rated content thrown in for good measure, into a numbing cavalcade of wrongness.

          In its sharpest moments, Fritz the Cat is a with-it takedown of pseudo-intellectual college dudes who feign existential angst in order to talk impressionable coeds into bed, and in its most juvenile moments, the movie is an over-the-top farce with characters humping in every portion of the frame. Bakshi can’t seem to decide if he’s after social commentary or cheap thrills, so the whole thing ends up being sloppy and tiresome. The movie shows nerve by depicting civil disobedience, drug use, police brutality, racism, rape, religious intolerance, terrorism, and other hot-button topics, but at a certain point merely depicting these things isn’t enough; one wants the picture to offer more than shock value.

          Bakshi also has no idea when to quit, layering on unpleasant scenes like the bit in which a redneck slaughters a truckload of chickens because their clucking annoys him, or, because one onscreen discharge apparently wasn’t enough, the scene of a dude standing up during a gang bang to urinate all over a cop. So, ultimately, Fritz the Cat is more of a déclassé museum piece than a true counterculture classic.

          The inevitable sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, simultaneously has more and less going for it than the original picture. (Bakshi didn’t return for the second film, so Nine Lives lacks his wild narrative approach.) On the plus side, Nine Lives has a discernible story structure—married to a shrew and living on welfare, Fritz gets stoned and hallucinates various alternate lives—and the animation is slicker. On the minus side, the movie gets so fixated on scatological humor that it’s like a precursor to the modern gross-out comedy. Sample Fritz dialogue: “Hey, Juan, you better get back in the phone booth, man—I feel a fart comin’ on.”

          Whereas the satirical targets of the first picture were the social mores of the ’60s, giving Fritz the Cat trippy coherence, Nine Lives goes all over the place, offering everything from simple sexcapades to elaborate vignettes about religion and, believe it or not, Naziism. The movie’s bizarre peak depicts Fritz as Adolph Hitler’s personal orderly, a sequence that climaxes with a nude Fuhrer confessing his homosexuality to Fritz while giant psychedelic skulls float around the screen; Hitler then tries to rape Fritz until an Allied bomb hits the site and obliterates Hitler’s one remaining testicle.

          Devotees of the Fritz movies might argue that the flicks make more sense when accompanied by controlled substances, but Fritz the Cat and The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat are so strange they almost are controlled substances.

Fritz the Cat: FREAKY

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat: FREAKY

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

          Years before Peter Jackson adapted J.R.R. Tolkein’s beloved fantasy-book series The Lord of the Rings into an Oscar-winning film trilogy, a bad-boy animator best known for pushing the boundaries of good taste took a stab at the material that was smaller in scale but, in some ways, almost as creatively ambitious. Though ultimately a frustrating misfire, Ralph Bakshi’s movie, The Lord of the Rings, has many commendable virtues and a handful of memorable elements; it’s not difficult to see what the picture was trying to become, and its failure to reach a lofty goal shouldn’t completely overshadow the nobility of the attempt.

          After cutting his teeth as a hired hand on various mainstream projects, Bakshi became an animation rock star with his controversial movie Fritz the Cat (1972), the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll comedy that became the first X-rated animated feature. Suddenly in a position to get financing for his long-held desire to put Tolkein onscreen, Bakshi set out to film the author’s three Rings books as a pair of long features, to be titled The Lord of the Rings: Part One and The Lord of the Rings: Part Two. (Filmmakers including John Boorman had previously tried and failed to get live-action versions off the ground.)

          To execute his vision, Bakshi decided to use an elaborate rotoscoping technique in which live-action versions of scenes are filmed, and then drawings are traced from each frame of live-action footage to form the basis of each frame of animated footage. Had this massive project been fully realized, it might have been extraordinary. Unfortunately, all the usual problems got in the way.

          The script, by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, is a limp recitation of scenes from Tolkein’s novels, sort of a lifeless Cliffs Notes synopsis, so the absence of a distinctive point of view (either Tolkein’s or Bakshi’s) renders the narrative flat. The rotoscoping delivered some interesting results, but because not every character was animated in exactly the same way, the style of the picture is disjointed; the marauding Orcs look shadowy and surreal, as if comprised of moving Xerox copies, while the principal characters are standard hand-drawn cartoons. Arguably, the most unique and vivid scenes are the big-canvas battles featuring armies of Orcs engaging in bloody swordplay with dwarves, elves, and hobbits—Bakshi creates a weird vibe that’s neither pure animation nor pure live-action, but a dynamic hybrid.

          The biggest problem with the movie, of course, is that Bakshi never got to make Part Two. Therefore, this picture abruptly ends partway through the story, leaving the narrative unresolved. (For those who know the material, the film stops immediately after the battle of Helm’s Deep, leaving Frodo and Sam stuck on the road to Mount Doom.) Yet while the source material isn’t served well by truncated adaptation, some of what Bakshi puts onscreen works. The characterizations of hobbits Frodo and Sam are sweet and infused with lifelike movement (Billy Barty provided the live-action performances upon which the cartoon versions of both characters were based); John Hurt gives a rousing vocal performance as heroic knight Aragorn; and Leonard Rosenman contributes a big, romantic orchestral score. So, for fleeting moments here and there, this Lord of the Rings hints at the grandeur with which Jackson thrilled the world years later.

          FYI, this project should not be confused with an earlier animated take on Tolkein. Famed kiddie-entertainment outfit Rankin/Bass made a dodgy version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit for television in 1977; Rankin/Bass also adapted the final Rings book, The Return of the King, for a theatrical cartoon in 1980, as a sequel to the Hobbit project.

The Lord of the Rings: FUNKY