Fritz The Cat

I have seen this movie exactly once in my lifetime before this. I was 13 and tricked my mom into renting it from the videostore. To this day I have never been found out. And per usual, my "Adult-oriented movie I shouldn't have seen as a kid" story is better than yours. I got you all beat.

I figured since it was on Amazon Prime, it was worth a revisit. I recall when I saw Hey Good Lookin' years later (I had been lukewarm on it as a teenager) I thought it was a blight upon the Earth. I was curious if the same thing would happen to Fritz. I'm not going to give it a positive review or a passing grade. What I will say is the movie is shockingly exactly like I remember when I saw it, like 35 years ago. That's how memorable it was at the time. I remembered all of these bits decades later. I almost NEVER do for movies I saw as a kid. It's a crap movie. That I'll never forget. "I shot the John!" I never forgot that bit. And it's exactly the same decades later. Or "Ever make it with an Aardvark?" I remember that joke from when I was 13! That's wild to me.

One of the reasons I rewatched Hey Good Lookin' was because as a kid I always assumed I didn't understand it because it dealt with adult themes beneath what my tender mind could grasp. I felt the same sort of detachment towards the Doonesbury comic strip as a kid. I get Doonesbury as an adult, but I knew it wasn't for me as a kid. I wanted to see what Ralph Bakshi messages similarly sailed over my head back then.

It turns out the reason my 14-year-old self believed Hey Good Lookin' was an utter mess, is because it WAS an utter mess. There was no larger subtext that I missed. It was sincerely that dumb. It made absolutely no sense, and Bakshi's script is just awful on every level you can think of. I was very surprised rewatching Fritz the Cat that there WERE indeed adult themes I was unable to grasp at the time.

Make no mistake: Fritz's script is a mess too. But there are larger themes present in this film that I didn't get as a kid.

The biggest theme I didn't understand is that Fritz is the villain of the film. It's like Bakshi read Catcher In The Rye, thought Holden Caulfield was a worthless sack of crap, and used Fritz to prove it with receipts. One of the themes I was astounded to realize somebody as otherwise racially tone-deaf as Ralph Bakshi understood is that white liberal arts college students of the 1960's claiming solidarity with the disenfranchised minorities, and promising to stand with them side by side during the revolution, are in reality cowardly pieces of instigating crap. And that describes Fritz, who is always stirring up trouble because he's bored, and quietly slinks away with his literal tail tucked between his legs when a bunch of people get killed for taking his nonsense seriously. I am not surprised what an utter sexually perverted creep Fritz is. It's on-brand for that movie. What shocks me is that Fritz is a searing indictment of insincere white liberal guilt, and how destructive it can be to minorities who fall for it. I have always felt Ralph Bakshi's claims of loving black culture are a mile wide and an inch deep just based on a lot of his output like Hey Good Lookin', Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin. But he certainly shows the right amount of self-awareness with that idea here.

But the film is a mess. I mean it's comedy, and Duke's death is absolutely effecting and horrific (him envisioning the billiards going into the pockets as his heart slows and then stops is actually haunting), and immediately afterwards they show this cartoony police car chase around town set to literal circus music. The film cannot decide what it wants to be.

And I'll tell you what it ultimately sadly is. And it's not something Bakshi wanted it to be, and in fact took great pains to make sure it wasn't. In hindsight, he failed. The genre Fritz the Cat most comfortably fits into is pornography. It's true. The cartoon sex and nudity are portrayed in the most salacious and obvious manner possible. Just like porn. It's done to give the viewer a sick thrill. Just like porn. The nudity and sex are basically what the movie advertises on posters and videocassette boxes. Just like porn. Bakshi was very annoyed that a lot of talentless perverted animators showed up to gleefully make this dirty movie without realizing he wanted it to be well-animated and credible during those scenes. He fired them. The scenes still aren't anything but pornographic. They are also exploitative as hell.

The best animated scene in the movie was the extended shot of the crow grooving to music in the dark as the colored lights spilled over him. Frankly, I can't think of much animation in Bakshi's career that I'd declare well-animated. That is a nice notable exception for that specific reason.

Fritz is one of the most unusual screen villains in that he is the actual protagonist. I don't think we are supposed to root or sympathize with him, but it's weird we mostly see things through the eyes of a chaotic, destructive, narcissistic sociopath.

The music is great. Do you know what's weird? I actually remembered it 35 years later. That is absolutely crazy to me.

It always amused me (even back then) that the X-rated disclaimer is flashed only after the final credits end. Little late, right? Young Tommy isn't getting to sleep tonight.

Like most of Ralph Bakshi's other films, this is a mess, and an exploitative mess at that. Unlike those other "adult" cartoons Bakshi puked out in the 1970's and 80's, I think Fritz is the one thing in his filmography on that subject that actually has a bit of merit. Also notable, because despite the fact that almost all of Bakshi's films have out-there, cartoonishly outrageous jokes that don't fit their premises, his first film is his one and only comedy. It's a bit of an unusual project for him for that reason too. Fritz is his his only "Adults only" project that isn't majorly depressing. And there are dark as hell themes. But even poor Harriet's terrible ordeal didn't leave leave the bad taste in my mouth Heavy Traffic, Hey Good Lookin', Coonskin, and American Pop did. Probably because Bakshi had enough good taste in him to not actually show the rape, which was another pleasant surprise to me.

But it's a bad movie, really. That I never forgot. And I probably never will. **1/2.