gangstahippie Rated R for Graphic Violence,Nudity,Language and Brief Drug Use Heavy Traffic is another adult animated film from Ralph Bakshi.I have seen plenty of Bakshi films.I first got interested in Bakshi when I saw Fritz The Cat.I really enjoyed that movie and it is still Bakshi's best in my opinion.Coonskin was good but nowhere near as good as Fritz.Hey Good Lookin is another great Bakshi film as well.I plan on viewing American Pop next(if I can find it) and then Bakshi's fantasy films like Wizards,Lord Of The Rings and Fire and Ice.Heavy Traffic has a decent enough story and some funny scenes. and if you like Bakshi's other films, you should check this one out.The film is about Michael, a pinball playing virgin with an Italian father and a Jewish mother.His mother and father are always fighting and trying to kill each other.Michael is friends with a black bartender named Carol who gives him drinks in return for his sketches.After Carol gets fired, she stays at Michael's place where his father dislikes carol.So Michael and Carol leave and Carol becomes a prostitute.They end up robbing and killing a man for cash and then Michael gets shot.The film mixes live action and animation.The ending is fairly weird and does not make much sense but Heavy Traffic is a fun animated film that you should check out if you can find it.

DarthBill No real plot, basically a collection of events from the life of an angry young Italian-Jewish man named Michael inter-spliced with him playing pinball in an arcade, the one bright spot in his life being a black hooker named Carole.This is one mean, nasty, disgusting little film that is so relentlessly bleak and uncompromising in telling the viewer that life is a hopeless Hell that it's unbearable, and the incredibly bad animation does not help. Did I mention that the characters are mostly unsympathetic? Some genuinely funny dark humor isn't enough to relieve the strain.While I applaud Ralph Bakshi's efforts & desire to use animation for adults and show it could be used for more than just entertaining kids, he really drops the ball with this one, allegedly his personal favorite. Hell, his Lord of the Rings and American Pop, flawed as they were, were better than this.

ozzfan2 A few previous critics of this work by Bakshi slam it for being "stereotypical" and thereby negative as a whole by implementing foul humor, language and at times even suggest that because it's a cartoon that it owes something to child-oriented animation. This is absolute pig swill. Bakshi's vision in Heavy Traffic is to present life on the streets as he knows it. His style is truly unique, overlaying animation onto real stills and film sequences to add to the New york flavor that exists throughout the film. An abusive Italian married to a worrying Jewish woman is part of our reality. Gays being abused and people having to worry about their jobs being taken by minority groups for less pay and benefits because they're more desperate than we are is part of our reality. Love regardless of skin color, and facing the consequences for it is SADLY part of our reality. By using animation, Bakshi is exercising his artistic abilities while setting it in times and themes he is familiar with. This film, along with the criminally banned Coonskin should be hailed as modern masterpieces not for their visual aspects, but for the truth lying beneath and his unabashed look at how life really is. Comparing this film to "Shrek" is like comparing the original Night of the Living Dead to the recent Dawn of the dead remake. Granted they're both horror, but they're lightyears apart and don't use any of the same effects techniques. One, like Heavy Traffic, was made for social commentary, whereas the remake, like Shrek, is merely for our homogenized entertainment values.

Pepper Anne If you typically like Bakshi's movies, this may not be a good one to start off on, nor likely one to watch at all. It is missing the artistic beauty of American Pop and the comedy of Hey Good Lookin'. It is jammed pack with a confusing story about sleazy city dwellers.The movie combines live action and animation, though the majority of the film is animation. It opens with a scene at an arcade, and Mike, the main character (both in the live action and animated segments) is playing a pinball game. As situations arise in the film, we are constantly referred back to this pinball game in progress, thus being forced to find the connection between the two. There are a lot of different characters here that all impact one another, eventually becoming one story. Mike is a cartoonist. His father is involved with the mafia. His mother is a drunk who wants to kill his father. His friend is a transvestite. And, he eventually picks up a former hooker/bartender as a girlfriend, and together, they're going to figure out how to get enough cash to get the hell out of the city and move out to the West Coast. The story is confusing however, not only in the amount of characters you have to keep track of and their place in all of these interconnected events, but often, you are confronted with scenes without dialogue or some that don't seem to connect to the rest of the movie. Plus, there's a whole lot of people just looking to get laid, so there are a lot of naked cartoons running around, which is a bit frustrating when you're looking for more, not less, to help you figure out what the heck was going on half the time. Not to mention, once the cartoon story ends (consequently along with the pinball game), the live action story continues. Even though the fate of those live action characters were decided in the cartoon universe, it gets contradicted in what seemed like an unnecessary ending that also occurs in the live action universe. Bakshi cartoons are known for excellent animation, especially as you see it in American Pop, but Heavy Traffic, while fitting for it's day, doesn't have that same beautiful artistry as American Pop (even though there is about a twenty-five year difference between the release dates of the two films). I suppose, being one of Bakshi's earliest, it was more experimental than the later films. And it was one that I found difficult to appreciate.