Fritz the Cat is a 1972 adult American animated comedy film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi. It was Bakshi's feature film debut and loosely based on the comic strip of Fritz the Cat by Robert Crumb. This is the first animated feature film to receive X rankings in the United States.
The film stars Fritz (voiced by Skip Hinnant), an anthropomorphic cat in the mid-1960s in New York City that explores the ideals of hedonism and sociopolitical awareness. This film is a satire that focuses on the life of American campuses in times, race relationships, free love movements, and left-wing and right-wing politics.
The film has a troubled production history and a controversial release. Crumb has a dispute with filmmakers over the political content of the film. Fritz the Cat is controversial for its rating and content, which many viewers at the time were considered offensive. It was produced with a budget of $ 700,000 and grossed $ 90 million more worldwide. His success led to many animated films and other X-rated sequels, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974), made without the involvement of Crumb's or Bakshi.
Video Fritz the Cat (film)
Plot
In the park of New York City, hippies gathered with guitars to sing protest songs. Fritz and his friends appear in an attempt to meet the girls. When the fascinating female trio passed by, Fritz and his friends tried to get their attention, but found that the girls were more interested in the crows standing a few feet away. The girls try to flirt with the crows, making unintentionally condescending comments about blacks, while Fritz looks annoyed. Suddenly, the crow crows at the girls with a sarcastic comment, indicating that he is gay and walks away. Fritz invites the girls to "seek the truth", taking them to his friend's apartment, where a wild party is taking place. As the other rooms were crowded, Fritz dragged the girls into the bathroom and the four of them sexed in the tub.
Meanwhile, police (described as pigs) arrive to attack the party. When the two officers walked up the stairs, one of the party goers found Fritz and the girls in the tub. Some others jumped in, pushing Fritz aside where he took entertainment in marijuana. The two officers entered the apartment, but found that it was empty because everyone had moved to the bathroom. Fritz took shelter in the toilet when one of the pigs came into the bathroom and started beating up the party diners. When the pig became exhausted, a very drunk Fritz jumped out, grabbed a pig gun, and shot the toilet, causing the main water to break and flooding everyone out of the apartment. The pigs chased Fritz on the way to the synagogue. Fritz managed to escape as the congregation rose to celebrate the US decision to send more weapons to Israel.
Fritz returns to his dorm, where his roommates ignore him. He decides to throw his life away and organize all his burning records and books. The fire spread throughout the dormitory, eventually making the whole building on fire. At a bar in Harlem, Fritz meets Duke the Crow at the pool table. After a bit of avoiding a fight with the bartender, Duke invites Fritz to "tap", and they steal the car, which Fritz slid off the bridge, leading Duke to save his life by grabbing the fence. The two of them arrived at the apartment of a drug dealer named Bertha, whose joint gigs increased Fritz's libido. When having sex with Bertha, she realizes that she "has to tell people about the revolution!" He ran into the city streets and instigated riots, where Duke was shot and killed.
Fritz hid in an alley where his older fox girlfriend, Winston Schwartz, found him and dragged him on his way to San Francisco. When the car ran out of gas in the middle of the desert, he decided to leave it. He then meets with Blue, a biker rabbit who is addicted to heroin. Together with Blue horse's boyfriend, Harriet, they climb into an underground hideout, where several other revolutionaries tell Fritz about their plans to blow up the power plant.
When Harriet tried to get Blue to go with him to go to the restaurant, he hit him a few times and tied it with a chain. When Fritz objected to his treatment of him, he was beaten in the face by a candle by a group member. Blue and other revolutionaries then raped her. After arranging dynamite at the power plant, Fritz suddenly changed his mind, and unsuccessfully tried to remove it before getting caught in the explosion. At the Los Angeles hospital, Harriet (disguised as a nun) and girls from the New York park came to comfort him in what they believed to be his last moments. Fritz, after reading the speech he used to pick up girls from New York, became excited and had sex with a trio of girls, while Harriet watched in amazement.
Maps Fritz the Cat (film)
Cast
- Skip Hinnant as Fritz the Cat
- Rosetta LeNoire as Big Bertha/Additional sound
- John McCurry as Duke/Additional sound
- Judy Engles as Winston Schwartz/Lizard Leader
- Phil Seuling as Pig Cop # 2/Additional sounds
- Ralph Bakshi ( uncredited ) as Pig Cop # 1/Narrator
- Mary Dean ( uncredited ) as Girl # 1/Girl # 2/Girl # 3/Harriet
- Charles Spidar ( uncredited ) as Bar Patron/Duke the Crow
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Robert Crumb (born 1943) was a teenager when he created the character Fritz the Cat to publish a comic magazine he created himself with his brother, Charles. Characters first appeared to the wider public in humor magazine Harvey Kurtzman Help! in 1965. The lines place an anthropomorphic character - usually associated with children's comics - in stories with drugs, sex, and other adults-oriented content. Crumb left his wife in 1967 and moved to San Francisco, where he participated in counter-culture and engaged in drugs such as LSD. He has a countercultural strip published in an underground magazine and in 1968 published the first edition of Zap Comix. Crumb cartoons are becoming increasingly more transgressive, sexually explicit, and violent, and Crumb is at the center of the burgeoning underground comix movement. Fritz became one of Crumb's most famous creations, especially outside counter-culture.
Ralph Bakshi majored in cartoons at the College of Art and Design. He learned his trade at Terrytoons studio in New York City, where he spent ten years reviving characters like Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Deputy Dawg. At the age of 29, Bakshi was hired to head the animation division of Paramount Pictures as a writer and director, where he produced four experimental short films before the studio closed in 1967. With producer Steve Krantz, Bakshi founded his own studio, Bakshi Productions. In 1969, Ralph's Spot was founded as a division of Bakshi Productions to produce ads for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, a series of educational shorts paid by the EncyclopÃÆ'Â|dia Britannica. However, Bakshi is not interested in the kind of animation he produces, and wants to produce something personal. Bakshi was quoted in a 1971 article for the Los Angeles Times saying that the idea of ​​"adult men sitting in chambers drawing butterflies floating above the flower field, while the American plane dropped a bomb on Vietnam and children. " being marching in the streets, that's ridiculous. "Bakshi soon developed the" Heavy Traffic ", a story of street life in the city center, but Krantz told Bakshi that studio executives did not want to finance the film because of its content and lack of Bakshi's experience.
While exploring the East Side Book Store at St. Mark's Place, Bakshi invented a copy of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat (1969). Impressed by Crumb's sarcasm, Bakshi bought the book and suggested to Krantz that it would serve as a movie. Bakshi is interested in directing the movie because he feels that Crumb's job is the closest to his. Krantz arranges a meeting with Crumb, where Bakshi shows the Crumb drawing that has been made as a result of Bakshi trying to learn Crumb's style to prove that he can translate the look of Crumb's art to animation. Impressed by Bakshi's tenacity, Crumb lent one of his sketch books as a reference.
When Krantz began preparing the documents, preparations began at field presentations for potential studios, including a cel arrangement of painted posters featuring a strip cast against the background of a traceable photo, as Bakshi intended the film to appear. Regardless of Crumb's enthusiasm, he was unsure about film production, and refused to sign the contract. Cartoonist Vaughn BodÃÆ' Â © warns Bakshi not to work with Crumb, describing it as "slick". Bakshi then agrees with the judgment of BodÃÆ'Â ©, calling Crumb "one of the sneaky swindlers you have ever seen in your life". Krantz sends Bakshi to San Francisco, where Bakshi lives with Crumb and his wife Dana in an attempt to persuade Crumb to sign the contract. After a week, Crumb leaves, leaving uncertain movie production status, but Dana has the power and sign the contract. Crumb receives US $ 50,000, which is sent through various production phases, in addition to ten percent of Krantz taking.
Production
Funding and distribution
With the right to character, Krantz and Bakshi set out to find a distributor. "When I say that every major distributor rejects it, it is not excessive", recalled Krantz. "No project has ever been received with less enthusiasm Animation is basically a dirty word for distributors, who think that only Disney can paint trees, and besides, Fritz so far that there is a failure to understand that we are doing something very important. "
In the spring of 1970 Warner Bros. agreed to fund and distribute the film. The Harlem sequences are the first to complete. Krantz intends to release these scenes within 15 minutes if the funding of the film is withdrawn; Bakshi remains determined to finish the film as a feature. At the end of November, Bakshi and Krantz screened the presentation reel for the studio in this order, pencil test, and Bakshi storyboards. Bakshi stated, "You should see their faces in the screening room when I first filter out a little Fritz .I will remember their faces till I die One of them leaves the room Holy Hell, you should see his face "Shut your mouth, Frank! This is not a movie you can make! "And I said, Nonsense, I just made it."
The film budget is debatable. In 1972, The Hollywood Reporter stated that Fritz the Cat recovered the cost within four months of its release. A year later the magazine reported that the film had grossed $ 30 million worldwide and was produced with a budget of $ 1.3 million. In 1993, director Ralph Bakshi said " Fritz the Cat , to me, is a very big budget - at $ 850,000 - compared to my Terrytoon budget...." In an intereview published in the year 1980, Bakshi stated "We made a movie for $ 700,000 Complete".
Warner executives want sexual content to be softened, and to give big names for the voices. Bakshi refused, and Warner withdrew their funds from the film, leading Krantz to seek funding elsewhere. This led to an agreement with Jerry Gross, owner of Cinemation Industries, a distributor specializing in film exploitation. Although Bakshi did not have enough time to cover the film, Gross agreed to finance his production and distribute it, believing that it would fit his grindstone. Further financing came from Saul Zaentz, who agreed to distribute the soundtrack album on his Fantasy Records label.
Directions
Bakshi was initially reluctant to direct Fritz the Cat because he has spent years working on animated productions featuring animal characters and wanting to make movies that focus on human character. He became interested in working on this movie because he liked Crumb's work and considered it a "total genius". During the development of the film, Bakshi said that he "started getting dizzy" when he "suddenly could get a pig who was a policeman, and the other special pig was Jewish, and I thought, 'Oh my God - a Jewish pig?' big step forward, because at the beginning of Heckle and Jeckle for Terrytoons they are two black people hanging around, the hysterically funny and, I think, great - like Uncle Remus's things do not play south , and they had to turn two black crows into two Englishmen, and I always told him that the black crow was more funny, so it was a slow awakening. "
In his notes to animator Cosmo Anzilotti, Bakshi was right, and even determined that the crows smoked marijuana rather than tobacco. Bakshi states that "Weeds must be read on the screen This is an important character detail." The opening sequence of this movie sets the satirical tone of the film. The setting of the story period is not only fixed by the title, but also by dubbing by Bakshi playing the character giving his report about 1960: "happy times, heavy times". The film's opening dialogue, by three construction workers at their lunch break, sets out many of the themes discussed in the film, including drug use, promiscuity, and the social and political climate of the era. When one of the workers came out of the scaffold, the credits of the film were played over a liquid injection that fell on a black screen. When the credit ended, it was shown that construction workers had urinated on long-haired hippies with guitars. Karl F. Cohen writes that the film "was the product of the radical politics of the day." Bakshi's portrayal of Fritz's life is colorful, funny, sexist, raw, hard, and embarrassing. "
As for the direction of the film, Bakshi stated, "My approach to animation as a director is direct action, I do not approach it in traditional way of animation.No character we get up and sing, because that's not the type of picture I'm trying to do. people believe that my character is real, and it's hard to believe that they're real if they start singing on the streets. "Bakshi wants the film to be the antithesis of every animated film produced by Walt Disney Company. Therefore, Fritz the Cat includes two satirical references to Disney. In one scene, the silhouette of Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Donald Duck were shown cheering in the United States Air Force because of dropping napalm on the black environment during the riots. Another scene displays a reference to the "Pink Elephant on Parade" sequence of Dumbo . The panning camera sequence crosses the garbage pile in the abandoned place in Harlem makes a recurring visual device on Hey Good Lookin '.
Write
The original script consists mostly of dialogue and only displays some of the changes from the Crumb story. Scripts and storyboards are mostly not used to support more experimental storytelling techniques. Bakshi said, "I do not like jumping ahead on my movies.As you feel about a movie on Day One, you may not feel the same for forty weeks on the road. Characters thrive, so I want to have the option to change various things, and strengthen my character... It's a kind of stream of consciousness, and a learning process for myself. "Bakshi writes characters without the behavior of wild animals to lend greater material realism.
The first part of the film's plot is adapted from a self-titled story published in the 1968 edition of R. Crumb's Head Comix, while the second part comes from "Fritz Bugs Out", which was serialized in the February to October 1968 edition from Cavalier , and the last part of the story contains elements of "Fritz the No-Good", first published in the September/October 1968 edition of Cavalier . The last half of the film makes a huge departure from Crumb's work. The animated historian Michael Barrier describes this part of the film as "much more gloomy than the Crumb story goes through that point, and much harder." Bakshi states that he deviates from the comic because he feels that the strip lacks depth:
"Funny, sweet, but there's no place to put it.That's why Crumb hates the picture, because I slipped a few things there that he hates, like a pure Jewish rabbi.Fritz can '" I have such a comment. Winston is' just typical of the big Jews of Brooklyn... [Strip] is cute and nice, but no one has that much depth. "
Bakshi's unwillingness to use an anthropomorphic character that behaves like a wild animal leads him to rewrite the scene in "Fritz Bugs Out" where Duke saves Fritz's life by flying while holding Fritz; In the film, Duke grabs the fence before the car crashes into the river, a solution that Bakshi does not fully fulfill, but prevents him from using the behavior of wild animals in the scene.
In the film, there are two characters named "Winston" - one appears at the beginning and end of the film, the other is Fritz's girlfriend, Winston Schwartz. Michael Barrier notes that Winston Schwartz (who stands out in "Fritz Bugs Out" and "Fritz the No-Good") has never had a proper introduction to the Bakshi film, and interprets the naming of separate characters as Bakshi's attempt to reconcile them; However, both characters look and do not sound the same. Bakshi intends to end the film with the death of Fritz, but Krantz object to the ending of this story, and Bakshi eventually turns him to the end.
Casting
Voice of the film includes Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, Judy Engles, and the distributor/organizer of comic comic Phil Seuling. Hinnant, who will be known as a major player at The Electric Company, was cast because he "has a natural fake sound", according to Bakshi. Bakshi and Seuling improvised their dialogue as incompetent pig officers; Bakshi enjoys working as a voice actor and then proceeds to give voice roles to some of his other films. Bakshi re-created the sound he did in this film for part of the storm troop in his science fiction movie in 1977 Wizards .
Audio design
Some scenes use documentary footage made by Bakshi and edited to fit the scene; this is used because Bakshi wants the movie to "feel real". According to Bakshi, "I made tons and tons of cassettes.When I went to make the film mixed, the sound engineers gave me all sorts of nonsense about the tracks that were not professionally recorded, they did not even want to mix the broken bottle sounds in the background, roads, tape hiss, all kinds of shit They say it's unprofessional, but I do not care. "Although the sound designers insist that Bakshi need to re-record the dialogue in the studio, Bakshi remains at their inclusion.
Almost all film dialogue, except for some main characters, is recorded entirely on the streets of New York City. For the movie opening sequence, Bakshi paid two construction workers US $ 50 each, and drank Scotch with them, recording the conversation. In the order of Washington Square Park, only Skip Hinnant is a professional actor; Fritz's friends are voiced by the young Bakshi man found in the park. One of the sequences that is not based on the Crumb comics involves the pursuit of comics through a synagogue full of rabbi's prayer. To the voices of the rabbis, Bakshi used his father and his uncle's documentaries. This scene continues to have a personal meaning to Bakshi after his father and uncle died. Bakshi stated, "Alhamdulillah I have their voice, I have a father and a family praying, it's good to hear it now." Bakshi also goes to Harlem's bar with a tape recorder and spends hours talking to black customers, getting drunk with them when he asks questions.
Music
The movie score was composed by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin. The soundtrack was released by Fantasy Records and Ampex Tapes, along with the single, "You're the Only Girl" b/w "Winston". The film also features songs by Charles Earland, Cal Tjader, Bo Diddley, and Billie Holiday. Bakshi bought the rights to use the Holiday performance of the song "Yesterdays" for $ 35.
Animation
Many of the animators working in this film are professionals who had worked on Bakshi before in Terrytoons, including Jim Tyer, John Gentilella, Nick Tafuri, Martin Taras, Larry Riley, and Cliff Augustine. According to Bakshi, it took a long time to gather the right staff. Those who enter with a grinning smile, "want to be very dirty and draw dirty pictures", do not last long, and so do those with low tolerance for vulgarity. One cartoonist refused to draw a black crow shooting a pig's policeman. Two female animators quit; one because she could not bring herself to tell her children what she did for a living, the other because she refused to draw open breasts.
To save money by eliminating the need for model sheets, Bakshi let animator John Sparey draw some of Fritz's first order. Bakshi states that he knows that "Sparey will execute it beautifully." Pose from sequence photocopied and distributed to other crew. The film is produced almost entirely without a pencil test. According to Bakshi, "We pencil tested I would say a thousand feet [of the recording], a boss. [...] We do the main features without a pencil test - it's hard.It's time to fall in. I can always say the animator to draw it better, and I know if the attitude of the character is true, but the time that you really can not see. "Bakshi must judge the time of animation by simply flipping the animator's picture in his hand, until he can see the completed animation on the screen. Veteran Warner Bros. animator Ted Bonnicksen is very dedicated to his work in the film, to the point where he completed his animation for the synagogue sequence while suffering from leukemia, and will take a scene at home at night to work on it.
In May 1971, Bakshi moved his studio to Los Angeles to hire additional animators there. Some of the animators, including Rod Scribner, Dick Lundy, Virgil Walter Ross, Norman McCabe, and John Sparey, welcomed Bakshi's presence, and felt that Fritz the Cat would bring diversity to the animation industry. The other animators disliked Bakshi's presence, and placed an advertisement on The Hollywood Reporter, stating that Bakshi's "excrement" was not favored in California. According to Bakshi, "I do not know who these people are because I'm from New York, so I threw out the ad." However, Bakshi found a negative reaction to the film from his colleagues to be disappointing.
Cinematography
Because it is cheaper for Ira Turek to track down the photos to create the background, Bakshi and Johnnie Vita walk the streets of Lower East Side, Washington Square Park, Chinatown and Harlem to take photographs of gloom. Turek incised the outline of these photos into cels with Rapidograph, a technical pen favored by Crumb, providing a background of a stylish realism film that has never been described in previous animations. Once Turek finishes the ink background image on the animated cel, the image will be photocopied onto watercolor paper for Vita and onto the animation paper for use in matching characters to the background. When Vita finishes his painting, Turek's original picture, in cel, will be placed over the watercolor, covering the photocopy line on the painting. However, not all backgrounds are drawn from direct action sources. The background tone of the watercolors is influenced by the "Ash Can style" painter, which includes George Luks and John French Sloan. The film also uses the perspective of crooked cameras and fish eyes to mimic the way hippies and movie goons see the city.
Ratings
At the time of production completion, Cinemation has released Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song for great success, and the distributor hopes that the Fritz the Cat will be more profitable. Fritz received an X rating from the American Picture Film Association, the first animated film to receive the rating. Producer Krantz stated that the film had lost play ratings due to ratings, and 30 American newspapers refused to show ads for it or refused to provide editorial publicity. The limited film screenings caused Cinemation to exploit the movie content in its promotion of the movie, advertised it as "90 minutes of violence, excitement, and SEX... he's X-rated and animated!" According to Ralph Bakshi, "We hardly give an idea, because of the exploitation."
Cinemation ad style and movie rating make a lot of people believe that Fritz the Cat is a porn movie. When introduced like that at a show at the University of Southern California, Bakshi stated emphatically, " Fritz the Cat is not pornography." In May 1972, Variety reported that Krantz had appealed the rating of X, saying "Animals that have sex are not pornographic." The MPAA refused to hear the call. Misconceptions about film content were eventually removed when receiving praise from Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and the film was received at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Bakshi later stated, "Now they do many things on The Simpsons when I got the X rating for Fritz the Cat . "
Prior to the release of the film, American distributors tried to monetize the publicity obtained from the ratings by rushing out the dubbing version of two other Japanese animated films, both of which featured X ratings in their advertisements: Senya ichiya monogatari and < i> Kureopatora , renamed One Arabian Nights and Cleopatra: Queen of Sex . However, no movies are actually sent to the MPAA, and it is unlikely that any of these features will receive an X rating. Movies Down and Dirty Duck are promoted with an X rating, but have not been submitted to the MPAA. The French-Belgian animated film Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle was originally released with the X rating in the subtitle version, but the dubbed version released in 1979 received an R rating.
For the DVD release, MGM Home Entertainment has submitted the X rating for the video release without rating, despite the slogan "Dia X-Rated and Animated!" still used on the cover. Also, the MPAA screen "This movie has been rated X" looks right before the MGM logo at the end of the movie on DVD.
Reception
Fritz the Cat opened on 12 April 1972, in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Although the film has only limited release, it then became a worldwide hit. Against the $ 700,000 budget, it grossed $ 25 million in the United States and over $ 90 million worldwide, and is the most successful independent animation feature of all time. The film earned $ 4.7 million in video rentals in North America.
In Michael Barrier's 1972 article on production, Bakshi gave a report on two film screenings. From reaction to the movie by audiences at a preview screening in Los Angeles, Bakshi stated, "They forget the animation, they treat it like a movie... This is the real thing, to get people to take the animation seriously." Bakshi is also present at a "Some men ask me why I am against the revolution, the point is, animations get people up from their butts and get angry."
The film also triggers a negative reaction because of its content. "Many people panicked," said Bakshi. "The people responsible for the power structure, the people responsible for magazines and people will work in the morning who love Disney and Norman Rockwell, think I'm a pornographer, and they make things very difficult for me.The young people, the people who can take new ideas, are the people I meet I'm not talking about the whole world For people who love it, it's a great success, and everybody wants kill me. "
Critical reception
Critical reactions are mixed, but generally positive. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film is "constantly funny... [something] offensive to almost everyone." New York film critic of Judith Crist magazine reviews the movie as "a very funny, brilliant, and amazing entertainment...... whose target is...... kids and radical girls dirty head. " sixties, "and it" has to change the face of animated cartoons forever. "Paul Sargent Clark at The Hollywood Reporter calls the film" strong and brave ", while Newsweek calls it a" saga harmless, pro-teen calculated to shake only the best-selling film. " The Wall Street Journal and Cue gave a variety of reviews Thomas Albright from Rolling Stone wrote an enthusiastic preview in the December 9, 1971 issue based on a thirty-minute view of the film, stating that it "definitely marks the most important breakthrough in animation since Yellow Submarine." But in a review published after Albright retracted previous statements and wrote that visuals were not enough to save the finished product from "qualified disasters" because of "empty plots" and "teenage" scripts that also rely heavily on ethnic jokes and humorous humor.On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scores 58%, based on critic review 19, with an average grade of 5.5/10.
Film critic Andrew Osmond wrote that the epilogue undermined the film's integrity for "giving Fritz cartoon power to survival that the movie rejected until then".
Patricia Evans discovers scenes with "ferocious and offensive" Jewish stereotypes, and states, "Only the eyesight of director Ralph Bakshi, who degrades all characters, including heroes, makes one reflect the nature of the attack."
Crumb Response
Crumb first watched the film in February 1972, while visiting Los Angeles with Spanish underground cartoonist Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, and Rick Griffin. According to Bakshi, Crumb is not satisfied with the film. Among his critics, he said that he felt that Skip Hinnant was wrong for Fritz's voice, and said that Bakshi should have voiced the character instead. Crumb later said in an interview that he felt that the film was "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know.There is something real pressing on it.In a way, it's more curved than my stuff.This is really bent in some kind of weird, not funny way... I do not really like the attitude of sex in it It's like the horniness is pressed right, he kinda let it out compulsively. "Crumb also criticized radical left film criticism, denouncing Fritz's dialogue at the end of the film , which includes an excerpt from The Beatles' The End, as a "red and fascistic neck" and states, "They put words to their mouths that I will never tell him."
Reportedly, Crumb filed a lawsuit to have his name removed from film credits. San Francisco's attorney for copyright, Albert L. Morse said that no lawsuit was filed, but a deal was reached to remove Crumb's name from credit. However, Crumb's name has remained in the last movie since its theatrical release. In response to his dislike for the film, Crumb had a "Fritz the Cat - Superstar" published in the People's Comic in 1972, in which a jealous boyfriend killed Fritz with an ice rink; he has refused to use the character again, and wrote the filmmakers a letter saying not to use his character in their films. Crumb later quoted the film as "one of the experiences I mentioned." The last time I saw it was when I appeared at a German art school in the mid-1980s, and I was forced to watch it with It was a torturous, embarrassing triumph I remember Victor Moscoso the only one who warned me, 'if you do not stop this movie made, you'll regret it for the rest of your life' - and he's right. "
In a 2008 interview, Bakshi called Crumb an "impostor" and declared, "He went in many directions that he was difficult to mark.I talked to him on the phone.We both had the same deal, five percent.They finally sent Crumb the money and not me, Crumb always gets what he wants, including chau  ¢ teau in france... I do not respect Crumb Is he a good artist? Yes, if you want to do the same thing over and over again he should be my best friend for what I did with Fritz the Cat . I drew good pictures, and we're both okay. "Bakshi also states that Crumb threatens to separate himself from cartoonists working with Bakshi, who will hurt their chances of getting a published job.
Legacy
In addition to other animated films devoted to mature audiences, the success of the film led to the production of a sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat . Although producer Krantz and Hinnant voice actors returned for follow-up, Bakshi did not. Instead, the Nine Lives was directed by animator Robert Taylor, who co-wrote the films with Fred Halliday and Eric Monte. Nine Life is distributed by American International Pictures, and is considered lower than its predecessor. Both films have been released on DVD in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Bakshi states that he feels limited using anthropomorphic characters in Fritz , and focuses only on non-anthropomorphic characters in Heavy Traffic and Hey Good Lookin , but then used an anthropomorphic character in Coonskin .
While reviewing the aggregate of Rotten Tomatoes, which compiled contemporary reviews of various criticisms, gave the film a 56% score, the film is widely recorded in its innovation to display content never before described in previous animations, such as sexuality and violence, as well as John Grant in his book Master of Animation , "a groundbreaking film that opens new sights to commercial animators in the United States", presents "almost very accurate" depictions "of certain strata of Western society during a particular era... it has dated very well. " The subject of the film and its satirical approach offer an alternative to the type of film that has previously been presented by a large animation studio. Michael Barrier describes Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic as "not only provocative but very ambitious". Barrier describes the films as an attempt "to push beyond what has been done in old cartoons, even while building their strength".
As a result of this innovation, Fritz was selected by Time Out magazine as the 42nd largest animated film, ranking at number 51 on the list of Top 100 Movie Critics Institutions. the greatest animated film of all time, and placed at number 56 on the Channel 4 list 100 Greatest Cartoons . The recording of the film was edited into a music video for the 2007 Master's song "State of Clarity".
See also
- List of American films in 1972
References
The work cited
External links
- Fritz the Cat at IMDb
- Fritz the Cat in The Big Cartoon DataBase
- Fritz the Cat in the TCM Film Database
- Fritz the Cat at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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