First of all, a correction: film theatres will not reopen in Portugal on the 4th of May, as previously reported, but on the 1st of June. Second, The MacMahonian, in result of the current inexistence of theatre releases, and building up on the recent experience of reviewing 4 different versions of The Front Page in succession, hereby embarks on an even more ambitious endeavour, and also a litmus test for future and longer projects, possibly in print: a chronological review of the feature filmography of Ralph Bakshi, consisting of 10 feature films and starting today with his 1st, Fritz the Cat.
Ordinal sequence, at variance with established practice, established above, I now proceed to a summary description of Ralph Bakshy's career, TV a film animation director of krimchack (Turkic Jews of the Crimea) origin, who learned the ropes at Terrytoons (located in the now COVID19-battered New Rochelle, I used to live in the neighbourhood, this too shall pass) starting at the very bottom and working his way up to the position of director at the relatively young age of 25, upon which, fuelled by “frustrations with his failing marriage and the state of the planet” (Wikipedia dixit) proceeded to persuade studio executives to hire comic book and pulp fiction artists and writers, building a team which developed a new genre: the counter culture cartoon, Fritz the Cat becoming, several years later, the 1st feature long manifestation of such.
Fritz the Cat portrays a chapter in the life of the eponymous cat in zoomorphic mid 60s USA, cruising cynically and hedonistically through what was (through the lens of 1972) a hypocritical and politically bankrupt radical hippie scene, consisting mostly of dope, sex parties, jive and ludicrous attempts at terrorism.
Honed by his years as TV cartoon director, Bakshi´s animation comes across as lo-budget but expressive, a sort of grungier Hanna-Barbera style with a robust dose of Tex Avery lunacy. The film was the first animation feature film in history to be rated X, as it was an adult (as in porn, not as in for grown-ups) animation film, something unheard of in mainstream production at the time (and, truth be told, a considerable rarity since) chock-a-block with profanity and explicit sex (this being cartoon cats, bunnys etc sex...), Fritz as cat, cops obviously as stupid pigs, Harlem hep cats as crows, prostitutes as cows and so on.
As coeval resident NYT film critic and taste bonzo Vincent Canby wrote, Fritz the Cathas something to offend almost everybody, immersed in underground ethos while simultaneously nihilistically dismissive of same. Seen almost 50 years later, the film´s keenness to shock and offend wears thin, and the childish chaos and crassness grows tedious, after some 10 minutes. With much less swearing and shagging, Tex Avery was much more subversive and irrisory back in his day. Noneteless, Fritz the Cat predates, interestingly suggests and might even have influenced the punk aesthetic which exploded just a few years after its release to change urban culture in an order of magnitude seldom seen before or since. For that, and for the cartoon renditions of Bo Diddley and Yesterdays, Fritz the Cat merits contemporary attention.