Fritz the Cat at 50: The X-rated cartoon that shocked the US
Long article. Fritz the Cat mocked the political correctness of the time! His parents came from a different Palestine.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221101-fritz-the-cat-at-50-the-x-rated-cartoon-that-shocked-the-us
A blazer-clad student called Fritz attends drug-fuelled orgies, steals guns from corrupt cops, sets his college on fire, finds himself in the middle of a race riot, and blows up a power plant. These outrageous moments would have pushed boundaries in any number of grindhouse exploitation films, but this student was a cat, and the star of the very first X-rated animated film – decades before the likes of South Park hit our TV screens. Fritz the Cat, a bawdy 1972 rampage through New York's underworld, is the work of Ralph Bakshi, a legendary but equally divisive cult cartoonist who has never been a stranger to controversy.
Using social commentary equal parts scandalous and nihilistic, Bakshi completely flipped the script on what animation could do, in a world that had until then been dominated by Disney. An adaptation of three comic books by original Fritz creator and cult comic legend Robert Crumb, Fritz the Cat's scrappy animation contrasted its bright, lively main characters with often drab and gritty, realistic backdrops. For audiences more used to the wholesome hijinks of Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy, Fritz, which stuffed in more graphic sex scenes and bloody violence into its short run time than most live action films, came as a shock.
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. Asserting that animation could be for adults too, it was unquestionably influential in the way that it changed the industry, showing that independent animations outside of the traditional studios could be successful too. 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. Critics called it debased and pornographic; fans called it gritty and real: the jury is still out in the academic world over whether its explicit nature advanced the cause of animation for adult audiences, or hindered it. But it inarguably disrupted the animation industry, and its breakout success occurred against all odds.
Copyright, though, was only the first hurdle. With his low budget, Bakshi faced substantial challenges to get the film made. The animation was produced with such scant resources that the team had to completely omit pencil testing, the early-stage storyboarding of animation that ensures quality and timing, resulting in a unique, rough-and-ready style. Unable and unwilling to pay the fees of expensive voice actors, Bakshi 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." This 'found sound' technique lent the film a quasi-documentary style, and Bakshi says that jazz music was a major influence on his work owing to the "looseness" of the style – a kind of improvised approach to animation that would later appear in the Aardman Creature Comforts franchise, which animated conversations between real people.
Fritz's uncompromising attitude was "deliberately and very self-consciously offensive and its targets are everyone," Dr Noel Brown, senior lecturer in film at 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." A major part of its aim, appeal, and subsequent success was due to its "grotesque subversion of the Disney ethos", says Brown. "Animation in the US was seen as being exclusively for children, and Fritz plays on the incongruity of seeing explicit sex, nudity, swearing and violence in a medium known for its innocence, sentimentality, and avoidance of any deliberate ideological positions."
Under it all, Bakshi tells BBC Culture, was a 1960s underground liberal sensibility inherited from his parents, who emigrated from Haifa, then the British mandate of Palestine, to Brownsville, Brooklyn, via the USSR.