“Hey, what if cartoons, like, had sex?” is actually not as new a question as you might think. The cartoons have actually, like, having sex far longer than many people realise, with the first pornographic animations appearing at least four years before Micky Mouse did Steamboat Willy (which was not a porno which now seems like a bit of a missed opportunity).

But, while there has been sexually explicit animation for almost as long as there has been animation, it was always restricted to “stag” films. The mainstream perception of animation in the West, especially after the Hays office started cracking skulls, was that cartoons were for children.

Enter Ralph Bakshi.

Okay, if you’re a longtime reader of this blog then this isn’t your first rodeo. We have discussed his work here many a time and oft. Short version: Ralph Bakshi is at once a towering and transformative figure in the history of American animation and also kind of a terrible animator and film-maker. I can’t say I have actually enjoyed any of his films, but his best work tends to be the kind of grungy, ugly, politics-heavy film-making that you aren’t really supposed to enjoy. And, at least, Bakshi at his best his never boring.

No, you want really bad Bakshi you got to look at his tamer stuff. Either because he was taming himself to try and appeal to a broader audience (like Wizards) or because the studio held him down and cut his hair and forced him to conform to their, like, rules, maaaaan (like this fucking thing we’re about to review right here).

I will not mince words. This is the last of all Ralph Bakshi’s feature animations. I say “last” as in “last one he made” as well as “if all his movies were in a race, this is the one that wouldn’t even cross the finish line because it ate its own legs.”

This movie had a troubled history in the same way like, the Balkans, have had a troubled history and it’s easy to just blame the studio. In 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, gave Disney their biggest hit in history up to the that point, due in no small part to the instantly iconic appearance of Sexiest Cartoon of All Time Jessica Rabbit. Ralph Bakshi decided that, as the grandfather of sexy cartoons, the time had come for selling out. Bakshi approached Paramount and pitched them a dark cartoon horror story about a live action human who has sex with a cartoon woman and fathers a demonic half-human/half-toon child. Paramount greenlit the movie but forced Bakshi to cast Kim Basinger as the cartoon woman. Basinger wanted a more family friendly movie which led to the studio and Bakshi butting heads and resulting in the deeply compromised, barely coherent mess of a movie that we were left with. Everything that could go wrong with this movie did go wrong. Paramount launched a raunchy marketing campaign that completely oversold the limp PG 13 offering as some kind of taboo shattering sex-fest and then pretty much bribed the City of Los Angeles to allow them to descerate the Hollywood sign with a 75 foot cutout of Basinger’s character, Holly Would, which brought a hurricane of negative publicity.

Savage critical reaction and utterly abysmal word of mouth did the rest.

As I said, it’s easy to read that and assume that Bakshi was just another brilliant creative screwed over by the soulless suits but you know me. I never do things the easy way. Frankly, I think this project was doomed the second Ralph Bakshi thought he could do his own Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

See, the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was overseen by Richard Williams who I would probably rank as the single most brilliant animator I have ever had the pleasure of reviewing if Hayao Miyazaki didn’t exist. And one of the reasons why Roger Rabbit works so well (apart from the fantastic script, excellent direction, phenomenal world-building, perfect score, terrifying villain, a career best performance from the late great Bob Hoskins and Jessica Fucking Rabbit ushering an entire generation into sexual awakening) was that there was literally nothing Williams could not do as an animator. That movie has characters from eight different animation studios from across three decades and they’re all rendered flawlessly. That movie is like Once Upon a Studio but without the benefit of modern technology and feature length. That’s Richard Williams. That’s the guy.

Whereas Bakshi…Bakshi is not that guy.

The movie begins in 1945 when Frank Harris (played by an impossibly young Brad Pitt), returns home to Las Vegas after the end of the war and tearfully re-unites with his mother. After winning a new motorbike in a poker game he takes his mother on a joyride. A drunk-driver hits them and Frank’s mother is killed. And as a weeping Frank watches as his mother’s lifeless body is stretchered into an ambulance we learn that CARTOONS ARE REAL IN THIS WORLD.

No, serious, that’s how abrupt it is.

No transition, no establishing shot. It is jarring as fuck.

Alright, so the little bald dude up there is Doctor Vincent Whiskers who has built a device that he hopes will allow him to cross over into our world. Instead, the device pulls Frank into the cartoon universe. Frank, understandably still traumatised by his mother’s death, thinks he’s going crazy but Whiskers tells him that he’s in “Cool World” and wastes no time recruiting him as a police officer to protect Cool World from other “noids” (humans) who might crossover.

It’s about as rushed and nonsensical as it sounds.

Fast-forward to present day Las Vegas and cartoonist Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) is being released from prison for killing the man he found in bed with his wife. While in jail, he created Cool World, a comic book centred around blonde femme fatale Holli Would. In fact, Deebs has been getting visions of Cool World and Holli which have started become more and more real. After his release he visits a comic book store on the Las Vegas strip and gets talking to the cashier who recognises him and starts fangirling over Cool World. I’m going to be praising very, very little in this movie so let me say this. This cashier is probably the best acted and most likeable character in the whole movie. This film has career worst performances from Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt and Kim Basinger and they’re all acted off the screen by this one bit player who is in exactly one scene.

I actually looked her up and it turns out that’s Carrie Hamilton, daughter of Carol Burnett! Apparently she was a singer and playwright as well as an actor and inspired the hit single “Carrie’s Gone” before dying tragically young of cancer at the age of 38. She is awesome, and by far the best thing in the whole show.

Anyway, the cashier says that so many of her friends wanted to be Holli Would when they grew up and this is probably as good a time to talk about Holli as any.

Now, there are absolutely scads of female fictional characters who were conceived primarily to pander to male tastes which nonetheless managed to resonate with female audiences. A great example would be, well, the reason why we’re here in the first place.

I already went in depth in my Who Framed Roger Rabbit? review as to what makes Jessica Rabbit work and why she is so much more than just a cartoon thirst trap. The Lauren Bacall influenced design, the flawless, breathy vocal performance by Kathleen Turner and most importantly the power. You can be attracted to Jessica Rabbit. You can whistle and drool and have your eyes pop out of your head like a hormonally maddened wolf. But that just means she has power over you, bucko. You don’t have power over her. It’s a very, very tricky needle to thread and it could have gone so wrong. I know, because I’ve seen Holli Would:

If all you knew about Bakshi was that he created the first X-rated animated feature you might assume that he, at the very least, knows how to make sexy cartoons. But Imma let you in on a little secret.

Bakshi’s movies are not, and never have been, sexy. What they are is horny and there’s a big difference. There’s a crude, aggressive sexuality to much of Bakshi’s work but that’s a million miles from being something that any reasonable person could find genuinely titillating. Creating an animated character that can bypass the audience’s knowledge that this is just a collection of drawings and get to the lizard brain…that’s actually really, really challenging. And there is no way that Bakshi’s rough, jerky, slovenly style of cartooning could ever get there. So Holli is a nightmarish shambling creature from the Uncanny Valley with wandering lips and dimensions that shift like a lava lamp. But surely, legendary Oscar winner Kim Basinger can salvage this?

Look, I’m trying not to be mean here but I’ve never seen a Basinger performance that was better than “fine” and here she is sooooooo far out of her wheelhouse that I’m worried about her wheel being left unattended for so long. Some of that is not her fault. It’s a tragic truth of acting that a lot of things that make an actor suitable for a role are things that are completely outside of their control. Like, I have no doubt that Jim Carrey has worked his ass off perfecting his comic timing but you can’t deny that a big part of his success as a comedian is the fact that his face seems like it was designed by Tex Avery. Some people just have more expressive features. And Basinger is the opposite of that. She just doesn’t have a very expressive face. The studio basically forced Bakshi to cast Basinger because some no name like this “Brad Pitt” couldn’t be expected to carry a movie himself (crazy times). She was hired pretty much exclusively for star power. And it really shows. This is probably the most egregious example of miscasting I can remember seeing. Holli is a mess of a character, going from innocent ingenue, to manic pleasure seeking sex kitten to sultry, predatory femme fatale at a moment’s notice. And it would be nice if Basinger could do any of that but she can’t. And what makes this doubly comi-tragic is that this movie was counting on Holli so hard. She is front and centre on all the advertising. They draped her over the fucking Hollywood sign. They really thought they had the next Jessica Rabbit on their hands here.

But getting back to that line; “all my friends wanted to be Holli Would when they grew up”. I don’t have to imagine girls wanting to be Jessica Rabbit because I know many do, but I cannot for the life of me picture any woman wanting to be Holli Would.

Anyway, Jack Deebs is pulled into Cool World and we get my next big problem with this movie. You know the Toon Town sequence in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

You know, Bob Hoskin interacting with a completely animated world? Well, Cool World also has real human beings interacting with a cartoon world and it fucking looks like this:

Yeah. They’re just sets. The cartoon world is just a series of sets with flat painted backdrops designed to look vaguely cartoony. In any given scene with a human character set in the cartoon world, the only thing animated is the actual cartoon characters. It is the laziest fucking shit.

Sorry, Jesus Christ, if I don’t stop ranting at every single aspect of this film we’ll be here forever. JACK DEEBS ARRIVES IN COOL WORLD. Cool World is basically Wackyland from Looney Tunes except, instead of being kooky and funny, everyone is just an incredibly obnoxious asshole. After getting set upon by a bunch of characters he thinks are his own creations, he’s found by Holli and she bundles him into her car and takes him to a nightclub across town.

So here’s another bit of praise I’m willing to extend this movie. Like Wizards, this is a Bakshi movie with bad animation but absolutely jaw-dropping backdrops.

I don’t think the necessarily work for the story the movie is trying to tell (I’ll explain why in a minute) but I can’t deny these are amazing works of art in their own right. Bakshi absolutely excels when nothing onscreen is moving, which admittedly something of a handicap for an animator.

Anyway, Holi and Jack arrive at the nightclub and Jack instantly set upon by our old pal Frank who’s been living, ageless and unchanged, in Cool World since 1945. He confiscates Jack’s pen (because in Cool World anything that can draw is potentially a lethal weapon) and explains that he’s a cop whose sole job is basically state-sanctioned cock-blocking. It seems that if a noid and a doodle (cartoon) ever have sex, that would destroy both worlds. It’s a pretty out there concept, so I have taken the time to compose a Seussian rhyme to explain:

For you see, should a noid and a doodle canoodle

That noid/doodle canoodle creates a whole boodle,

Of problems that puzzle and stump the ol’ noodle

Ending the universe, kit and caboodle.

See, this is what happens when you conceive your entire movie around getting to watch cartoons having sex and then have to build a story around it. We have to now accept that Frank has spent the last five decades just wondering around Cool World and making sure that no random humans have somehow come through and starting sexing up the locals. What the fuck kind of life is that?

Anyway, Frank warns Jack not to have sex with the insanely hot (I mean, meeting the fictional reality presented on its terms, here) blonde and then just…lets him go. Like, I’m all for innocent until proven guilty but the man’s dick is a reality ending weapon, lock him up already.

Jack then gets warped back to the real world and Frank goes and visits Lonette, his cartoon girlfriend.

His INSANELY hot, cartoon girlfriend who he is obviously insanely attracted to and who wants to jump his bones but they CAN’T because that would end the universe. And this situation has persisted, presumably, for the better part of fifty years. The man’s balls must be bluer than Vermont on election day.

Seriously though, there is actually something quite sweet about this scene. Lonette asks Frank if he’d ever go back to the real world so he could be with someone and he says that he could never leave her, despite the fact that they can never actually be intimate. And I gotta say, Pitt’s low-key performance and Candi Milo’s excellent voicework (the difference when you actually hire a voice actor rather than a movie star) actually sells the scene as something genuinely tragic rather than ridiculously contrived.

Okay, this movie is padded to buggery so let’s just skip ahead to the reason why we’re all here, sick animals that we are. Jack returns to Cool World and, despite Frank’s best efforts he ends up in Holli’s bed where she proceeds to demonstrate six out of the twelve basic principles of animation: Anticipation, Straight Ahead Action, Slow In and Slow Out, Squash and Stretch, Follow Through and maybe a little Secondary Action if they’re not too tired. Oh, and Exaggeration too, because I’m pretty sure…y’know.

Sex turns Holli into Kim Basinger who decides that she wants to escape with Jack back to the real world. She goes to say goodbye to some of her friends and gets accosted by Nails, Jack’s partner, a cartoon spider. Shocked at her appearance, he tries to arrest her and she calls him “An Eight Armed Ink Spot”.

And she useS Jack’s pen to suck him up. Like, he’s ink so she sucks him up into the pen. You get it.

Oh, and this is the scene where Kim Basinger tries to act tough and streetwise and it’s like your mother throwing up gang signs. I don’t even know if she has kids but I feel embarassed for them.

Alright, so Jack and Holli return to the real world and their is so explosive that it draws the attention of two of Jack’s neighbours, Isabella and her daughter Jennifer, who just walk into his house to see if he’s okay. He assures them he is while Holli acts like she’s suddenly regressed to being a three year old. This whole scene is basically just we can introduce Jennifer who’ll be playing the role of audience surrogate who gets all the shit the movie pulls out of its ass to try and force a resolution at the end. Which is weird to me because this so obviously should be the comic book store cashier from before in this role. She’s introduced earlier, she knows Cool World and she even asks Jack out on a date. He turns her down in the movie but having her involved in his life would have made her a much more organic choice to show up again in the final act. Well, whatever.

Back in Cool World, Frank discovers that his partner has been seemingly killed and realises that it’s time to return to the real world to stop Holli and get revenge. Remember when I said that the backgrounds, while certainly striking, were actually to the detriment of the story? Here’s what I meant by that. Frank’s whole character arc is that, after the death of his mother, he’s basically been hiding in Cool World rather than face the hardships of real life. The problem is…I cannot buy anyone wanting to stay in Cool Word for eternity. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to stay in Cool World for a stopover flight. Because Cool World is hell. Look at those backgrounds again. It looks like Gotham City’s mother got fucked by Hieronymous Bosch who then went out for cigarettes and never came home. 99.9999% of ever character we see in this place is a demonic sex-and-violence crazed gremlin. And Frank seems to know it. Pitt doesn’t crack a single solitary smile all the time we see him here. He seems to hate the place almost as much as I do. So, other than Lonnie, I can’t think of a single reason why he wouldn’t want to return to the real world and I feel no sense of tragedy when he has to give this nightmare up.

Back in the real world, Jack and Holli start to glitch and turn back into cartoons. Holli is desperate to stay human and she tells Jack that there’s a legend that a doodle cross over to the real world decades ago and became the proprietor of a casino. She says that there’s something called “The Spike” at the top of the Union Plaza Hotel that will allow her to remain human permanently. Jack, realising that Holli is a few similes short of an analogy. He gets arrested by Frank who explains that if Holli touches the Spike the barriers between the two worlds come down and Jesus you can practically smell the flop-sweat from the writers as they try to bring this thing in to to land.

Jack, Frank and Jennifer (the neighbour girl) head to the hotel to stop Holli where they meet up with Doctor Whiskers, who it turns out was the doodle who crossed over and has been living in the real world ever since.

Frank tries to stop Holli from reaching the Spike and falls to his death, which means that it’s up to Jack to stop her. Holli pulls the spike out, causing all kinds of cartoons ghouls and ghosts to flood into the Las Vegas skyline because why limit yourself to ripping off Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when there’s so much good Ghostbusters scenes you could be ripping off too?

At the top of the hotel, Jack gets transformed into a square-jawed superhero voiced by Maurice LaMarche and…he never gets turned back. Gabriel Byrne’s character might as well be dead from this point on.

Oh yeah, another weird thing. Ralph Bakshi, celebrated American animator probably most famous for adapting comics to animation…doesn’t seem to know the difference between cartoons and comics. Cool World is definitely a CARTOON world, not a comic book one. There’s nothing that makes Cool World seem like a depiction of American comics, not even the kind of underground “Comix” that folks like R. Crumb were making. This appearance of a superhero is the first thing that made me say “oh yeah, these characters were supposedly dreamed up by a comic book artist”.

Anyway, Super Jack is able to return the Spike to it rightful place and he and Holli are both return to Cool World along with Frank’s body which is given to a tearful Lonnette. But! Because Frank was killed by Holli while she was in doodle form, he gets resurrected as a doodle.

Which, on the one hand, is the most grotesque ass pull I’ve seen outside of some pretty niche websites.

On the other, it allows the move to end so it’s my favourite part.

Scoring

Animation: 03/20

In a recent interview, Ralph Bakshi appears to have warmed to this, his final feature film and walked back his earlier disavowal. He also claimed that Cool World has some of the strongest animation he has ever done. To which I say:

Leads: 05/20

It’s a rare film that has a true dual-protagonist structure and I wish I could say that was as a result of bold, radical story-telling rather than a deeply compromised script stuck between several versions of what it wants to be. Both Brad Pitt and Gabriel Byrne are find actors but I would struggle to remember a worse performance from either of them.

Villain: 02/30

If you ever find yourself doubting whether you’re good enough to make it in life, just watch this film and remember that Kim Basinger was able to win an Oscar a mere five years later.

Supporting Characters: 03/20

A few of the background human characters have charm. Almost everyone in Cool World seems designed to be as aggressively obnoxious as possible.

Music: 03/20

Ill admit there are a few good tracks on the soundtrack but the background music is about as obnoxious as the rest of the movie. Points for consistency, I guess.

FINAL SCORE: 16%

NEXT UPDATE: 08 August 2024

NEXT TIME: Keeping with the theme of final movies by famous animators: