I just re watched this movie after reading the complete Robert Crump's Fritz the Cat comic book.
At first I was skeptical – It's never a good way to start the movie with showing a character pee an a person even in a raunchy one but I guess it was the creators way of saying "No, this is not for kids", since an animated movie NOT for children was something new back then
Actually I must give the movie some credit for being the first one to do it. I guess it's easy to criticize this movie today since we all scene stuff like this in "South Par", "Family Guy" or "Drawn Together" so there is nothing shocking about this kind of stuff anymore.
Any way after first five minutes I was actually starting to like the movie. While all the raunchy humor was done much better in the books (more tasteful in a way) the movie had still some good, unique atmosphere to it and I like the way it mixed different Fritz the Cat stories. Yhe, the sex stuff was over the top, I didn't care much for the two pig police man who try way to hard to be funny and I would prefer if some of the action scenes where more like in the book - simple. Still the movie had some great mod and abstract atmosphere, some of the new humor made me chuckle (for example the scene of three student girls talking with the African-American crow and trying to impress him how much liberal they are while he just stand their silent) and while not the best of Ralph Bakshi films I was still growing to like it
Then we got to the last third and the Fuzz Bunny character was re- introduce. Here I will start with the SPOILERS for both the book and the movie. Well, in the book the whole point was – students are idiots! They do nothing but smoke path, drink, have sex all the time and talk pseudo- philosophical stuff that have no impact on the world whatsoever
In the book there is a point where Fritz meet his friend Fuzz who join some sort of a liberal anarchist movement who is planning to blowup the bridge. It's not some scary, sinister organization. It's just four idiots sitting in a room and talk how their hate rich people and want to rebel. Fritz and Fuzz attempt to blow-up the bridge but they screw it up acting completely clues about the situation. This was one of my favorite part of the book and comedy came out from the way those guys where nonchalant abut their whole terrorist plot. While Craps book satires liberal students it didn't picture them as evil, simply as misguided and full of ambitions that lead nowhere. But sadly, while the first 3/4 of the movie is pretty faithful to events in the book, when it get to this part if becomes the flip side of the coin. Fuzz is no longer an streetwise guy, now he's some psychotic, sadistic drug user named Blue. The group of pseudo-philosophical students lead by some insane hippy guy turns into a dark religious cult located on a cemetery with sinister looking members and even use some Fascist symbolism. Fritz is no longer suppose to blow-up the bridge with his buddy but instead is meant to blow-up the nuclear power plant with an female lizard character who turn out to be truly evil and In the end Fritz changes his mind about the whole thing. Not only it takes a very comedic story and turn it into something scary and violent, but it demonize the radical left wing students. Maybe Bakshis point was to make the whole thing more dramatic to provide an exiting climax but for me not only it's completely ruins the spirit of the book but it feels to be out-of character for the movie as well.
Overall I enjoy parts of it and I still find this movie to be an interesting , unique and artistic interesting experience but if you're fan of the book you maybe strongly disappointed by the ending. It was just way off-character for Fritz universe...
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