Fritz the Cat
Director: Ralph Bakshi
Year Released: 1972
Rating: 0.5
Quite possibly the ugliest studio-funded animated film I've ever seen and one of the dullest X-Rated movies I've sat through: when you see how Japan followed this up in the nineties with such uncomfortable rape-fests as Urotsukidoji or Cutey Honey you wonder what's so controversial about stuff like this. Bakshi intends for it to be an incendiary look at Flower Power philosophizing and sexual freedom, but somewhere R. Crumb's child-like view of sex and artistic ingenuity is lost and replaced with crass flippancy and choppy animation. The cops are (naturally) bumbling idiots (and since it's a cartoon they're pigs) and the view of African-Americans is less than flattering (or is the black crows-straight-out-of-Dumbo thing supposed to be satirical?); Fritz, the main hedonist, never gets his comeuppance. Crumb was right to sue.
