Cinema: Pussyfooting

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT

Directed by ROBERT TAYLOR Screenplay by ROBERT TAYLOR, FRED HALLIDAY and ERIC MONTE

The exhibit now under consideration represents something of a curiosity: a rip-off of a ripoff. It will be remembered that the original cartoon feature Fritz the Cat — largely the work of the animator Ralph Bakshi — so enraged Fritz’s creator, the underground comic artist R. Crumb, that he disowned the whole movie. Crumb, a stringent satirist, had conjured up Fritz as a way to mock the poses of the pseudo hipster and to lay waste the giddy excess of the culture from which he sprang. Bakshi slicked Fritz up, cooled him out, and turned him into the perfect creature of everything Crumb had put down.

Now along comes Steve Krantz, producer of Fritz and likewise of this sequel — as squalid and witless an assembly of animation as could be imagined. By comparison, the Bakshi version looks like Fantasia. To escape the shrill accusations of his wife, Fritz drifts off into cannabis reveries where his libido can run unchecked and where his paranoia eventually assumes control. He idles back to the high-stepping 1930s, then works his way up to the present and a visit with a Bowery bum, whom he accidentally immolates. In the film’s most elaborate episode, he eases himself off into the future.

Here Kissinger is President and blacks have separated from the rest of the country and live in New Africa (formerly New Jersey). Fritz is appointed a messenger between Washington and the dissidents. His trip through New Africa is an eerie nightscape full of rubble and reflexive violence. The whole state resembles every honky’s worst idea of what those niggers would get up to if left on their own. The movie tries to be freaky, but it is far too calculated. It looks altogether about as hip as one of those blacklite posters in a penny arcade.