capone666 Fritz the CatWhen your cat is in heat it's best to hide all of your plush Hello Kitty dolls.Thankfully, the randy tabby in this X-Rated animated-comedy prefers real pussy.At the height of the 1960s hippy movement, college burnout Fritz the Cat (Skip Hinnant) is out on the prowl for some of that free-love that's going around. And while he manages get a hold of some, it's short-lived on account of the Pigs.Fritz eventually gets caught up in all of the drug use, civil disobedience and revolutionary acts of the times all in an attempt to regain his waning libido.A socio-political cartoon imbued with anthropomorphic orgies, racial stereotypes and radical ideas, Ralph Bakshi's debut feature film adaptation of underground artist R. Crumb's hedonistic frat-boy lives up to its X-Rating, but not to Crumb's satirical and subversive comic- strip. Besides, when you have nine lives AIDS isn't that big of a deal.Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

ElMaruecan82 Cult-cartoonist Robert Crumb was a pioneer of the counterculture movement, with Fritz the Cat as the mascot (among many) of his psychedelic period. And Ralph Bakchi was an animator who thought that adults could do better than drawing cute creatures behind cubicles.The combination of both talents lead to the first X-rated animated feature, also the most successful independent animated feature to date. Bakchi contested the rating saying that pornography was supposed to involve humans; actually, I think the rating was right when you consider the same was given to "Midnight Cowboy".The problem is that the film isn't pornographic in the way we all picture pornography (at least now that Internet exists), the American Rating System just didn't have an intermediary category that could allow non-graphic films to target a wider audience. How do you make the difference? A porn film is only meant to arouse you, there's no other point, it has no story and works on the lowest emotional level.The same can't be said about "Fritz the Cat" whose sexual scenes are handled with a lot of humor and almost innocent fun by today's standards, sex is always funny, never arousing (they're animals for God's sake!) and the real defining aspect of the story is its raw, commentary on American society in the late 60's. And talk of a promising start! Three construction workers (average Joes) discuss during their break, seated on a girder. They complain about the collapse of American ideals: no family, no moral, no religion, it's not much what they say, but the way they say it that feels real and authentic. Just before shining the spotlight on the outcasts, the makers give the silent majority a shot.And does Ralph Bakchi stand for, exactly? Well, you almost get an answer when one of the worker pees and the yellow liquid form the opening credits before landing on a hippie's hair. In a way, it's kind of reassuring. We know the American Dream failed but the best movies of the New Hollywood period showed that the alternatives were no better.And these movies generally followed the same pattern: a misfit character trying to fit within a urban society full of contradictions and disillusions, where the American Dream shown its limitations after the racial riots, the Vietnam War and/or Richard Nixon, like "Easy Rider", "Midnight Cowboy", "The Last Detail", "Scarecrow" or "Taxi Driver".And with the opening discussion, the tone is set and we expect a film that will raise relevant social questions just like the others. And boy, did I set my expectations high, I must admit it, I'm a sucker for New Hollywood movies and the concept of "Fritz the Cat" had everything to please me, but while the film delivers a sharp critic of society, all made of conflicted interracial relationships or authority issues (the police officers are portrayed as pigs), as far as storytelling goes, this is another story.And this is a pity because the first part was so full of premises. Indeed, Fritz, a misfit student attracts three pretty suburban 'white' girls to a sordid apartment, just by pretending to be in a sort of existential quest, and this leads to a memorable orgy in a bathtub. This was a brilliant way to denounce the intellectual bullshit (mostly a bourgeois thing) where sex was the end of the fight for freedom, not the means. This is the line that separates between rebellion and decadence.It's also a denunciation in the same vein than the "South Park" episode when Stone and Parker settle their differences with hippies, portraying them as lazy parasites who betrayed their ideals and only thought of smoking pot and getting high while collecting acid trips, even Crumb admitted that he never got into that hippie movement.A similar scene occurs halfway through the film when Fritz, after having left the University, in quest of a 'real meaning', visits a black neighborhood. I don't know if it's a nod to "Dumbo" but blacks are portrayed as crows, is it shocking? No more, no less than having a Jewish cop being a pig… every group is equally assaulted in the film.Fritz starts a riot in Harlem, but then it goes out of control and the area is bombed with napalm and while he's leaving, he shouts a hypocritical "we shall overcome". Here again, violence is supposed to be the mean, but it becomes the end. Sex and violence are the two poles around which Fritz journey gravitates, the problem is that the film doesn't find its way and gets too episodic to let us digest the well-meant points it makes.A shame because the drawing (rather than the animation) was top notch, it encapsulates the spirit of the late 60's and never had the Big Apple felt so realistically rotten. There were many great characters, especially Duke, the crow, who could have made a great pair with Fritz, instead of the nagging feminist girlfriend who pops up in the third act, out of nowhere. Was Bakchi carried away by this project or in a rush to finish it? I don't know, but the last twenty minutes were too dark, even by the film's standards.It's even more frustrating because the first half is really enjoyable, but then I found myself waiting for something to happen and well, quoting one of the students, I wasn't "there" anymore.Of course, I could just love the film on the simple basis of its revolutionary aspect, that it broke new grounds in animation, was a gritty slice of American life in its most tormented era, but then I'd feel like the three students who were complimenting the black crow for nothing else but the fact that he was black.I didn't dislike the film, but I guess I'd be more fascinated by a film about its making, something worth a tag-line à la "Lolita".

dromasca Having spent the 70s in Romania and missed much of the cultural fresh air, I am in a continuous process of recovering some of my lost time. Music was the only form of art which crossed the Iron Curtain thanks to Radio Free Europe and to the vinyl records smuggled through customs, but otherwise I am still catching up with much of the books, films, and arts of the times of my first youth. The animated feature Fritz the Cat realized in 1972 by Ralph Bakshi was one of the sensations of these years, the first animated movie to be X-rated and break the taboos of the children and family oriented cartoons industry. Bakshi himself - born in Haifa in 1938, and brought by his family in the US in 1939 - seems to be an interesting character and creator, refusing to compromise and to follow beaten paths. He rather seems the kind of artist who breaks his path through.With 'Fritz the Cat' Bakshi takes a popular comics character created by Robert Crumb and throws him in the decadent New York of the beginning of the 70s, as kind of a fall-out student whose only purpose in life is having sex with as many and as different girlie animals as possible, smoking pot, and participating a revolution or two on the way. I liked the way Bakshi positioned his character catching the big features of the hippie generation, and placing it in relation with the other anti-establishment movements of the era - the anarchistic revolutionaries, and the Black Panthers. We recognize the landscape from the metropolis and universities of the 'Undergraduate' to the desert crossed by the trucks and motorcycles of 'Easy Rider'. We laugh at the characters (an anthology scene has three NY chicks trying to draw the attention of a black - well, crow with texts about how beautiful is the color, another one features the cat followed by pig policemen in a synagogue, with one pig being .. hum, Jewish), we recognize the music - original score, sounds authentic because it is authentic. It's irreverent and daring.'Fritz the Cat' may not be a masterpiece and was never meant to be one. Animation is maybe not mother of innovation, and the pace of the story does not match the masterpieces of the genre it departs from, but the same happens when a road movie is compared to a thriller which happens on the roads. It is an important film in my opinion because it broke the conventions and showed the power of the genre. Many other creators followed, not in the same genre, not in the same mood, but using the techniques and daring to dare, because after Fritz using animation for any subject was possible. Fritz was unique.

PeterMitchell-506-564364 I don't respect anyone who hasn't seen Fritz The Cat. Way way before The Simpsons and The Family Guy, this dirty intellectual cat, who's prone to smoking bongs and involving himself in orgies, created quite an uproar. This very clever animation, not for kiddies, shows this naughty cat get into some real mischief, one party where two cops (of course looking like pigs), are called out, one of them horny. One of the V.O's here sounds like Brad Garrett. Fritz and his girl take off. His car runs out of petrol. Real cool about it, as nothing really phases Fritz, he heads off on his journey. The finale where Fritz blows himself up, and surviving, really goes to prove, that cats do have nine lives, and where stitched up in hospital, he doesn't let this deter him in his sexploits. The script runs deep in potent dialogue, dealing with real issues of the sixties as if all the animated characters were real. But really, I think a lot of us just want to see some cats get it on and be amused at the same time. A comic adult romp, of cult status. Watch at your own risk.