Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. It’s bizarre, inappropriate, offensive, and fascinating.
Now 50 years old, this adult animation shocked the US. Hell, it’ll shock people today. I was stunned that I’d never heard of it until stumbling across this article. A little determination and I managed to find a clip of the whole thing online.
Fritz the Cat and His Nine Lives
_______________________
Selections from:
Fritz the Cat at 50: The X-rated cartoon that shocked the US
By Tamlin Magee
It was a runaway success, in spite of its less-than-shoestring budget of under $1 million, and it went on to become the highest grossing independent animated film of all time.
As rough and raw as it was, Fritz held up a mirror to inconvenient truths about US social issues that have never faded – fraught race relations, inequality and police brutality.
Crumb [the creator of the original comic strip] mostly kept his distance from the production and, on its release, was so appalled by the film that he responded by writing the very last Fritz comic, Fritz the Cat – Superstar, where the character had become a sleazy sell-out and movie star who meets with Bakshi and Krantz, before meeting his Leon Trotsky-style fate of murder by ice-pick.
Unable and unwilling to pay the fees of expensive voice actors, Bakshi [creator of the animated film] instead turned to real people on the streets of New York City. “I said, ‘the hell with that,'” Bakshi tells BBC Culture, about the costly fees of professionals. “‘Just get real people’. I used their voices because, first of all, it’s dirt cheap. But a lot of times I just let the recording roll, and they were talking about whatever they were talking about. I got a lot of great stuff, and it dawned on me that this was sensational. When I heard the natural sound, the traffic in the background and what they were saying, I absolutely loved it.”
Rather than design whole new cityscapes from scratch, Vita travelled with his camera all around Greenwich Village and Harlem; the settings were traced over and then coloured with Luma dyes, creating an effect that’s realistic yet just slightly off-kilter, cartoonish, dreamlike – and drawn over by animator Ira Turek with the same kind of Rapidograph technical pen used by Robert Crumb, preserving his style but transported to a cartoon version of New York, making it an animated film shot “on location,” says Bakshi.
Bakshi ultimately viewed these budget constraints as a blessing: having no money forced him to innovate within the limitations that had been imposed on the film. “If you fight the budget, you sometimes come up with creative thinking that far surpasses what you would have done if you had a lot of money,” he says. “If you had money, you automatically hire the best painters, the best animators to do this and that, and the best actors. That’s what everyone else in the industry did.”
The emergence of independent, experimental, subversive films, together with changing social attitudes to young people – who started to see themselves as teenagers and students with rights – meant that Fritz the Cat arrived at exactly the right time. “Fritz is like Impressionistic painting; he let the edges show,” says Furniss. “[Bakshi] defied people to say, ‘that’s cheap’ or ‘that’s rough’. That was what he wanted. It’s gritty, and that’s what life was like, and that’s what teenagers were feeling at the time: ‘this is authentic’. So you have to look at it from a larger perspective of experimentation.”
“Bakshi hired African-Americans to voice his crows, thus rejecting his predecessors’ casting of European-Americans for African-American characters,” says Christopher P Lehman, an animation historian and professor of Ethnic Studies at St Cloud State University. “On the other hand, Bakshi’s crows replace the antebellum minstrel tropes with urban African-American stereotypes instead: the pool hall, the prostitute. Moreover, the images come from the imaginations of European-Americans, Robert Crumb and Bakshi.”
Liverpool Hope University, tells BBC Culture. “The establishment (the police are pigs, literally, and we see the military gleefully blowing up Harlem), hippies, phony liberals, fake intellectuals, violent revolutionaries, hypocritical religious leaders, militant feminists, dumb workers and hicks – in this world everyone is either moronic or on the make.”
