Cool World

I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike WizardsStreet Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!

After Street Fight the next film on my viewing regiment was Bakshi’s most publicized studio head butt, The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi had wanted the film billed as Part One so as not to confuse the audience on why the entire saga was not shown in the film. But the studio decided no one would want to go to part one of a series of films, so they dropped the qualifier against Bakshi’s wishes. Sure enough, as Bakshi had predicted, viewers and critics were confused and outraged when the film ends in the middle of the story, prompting numerous complaints of being suckered out of their money. The film was a critical disaster, yet Peter Jackson has widely admitted the film heavily influenced his own Lord of the Rings trilogy. If only The Lord of the Rings was Bakshi’s worst studio project.

One of the more interesting aspects of Bakshi’s career is how plainly obvious it was that studios had no idea what to think of his films. Bakshi’s films were dark, biting, acerbic and deeply personal projects that blatantly rejected the Disney animated film paradigm of easy to digest mainstream fare. Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat perfectly represented the zeitgeist nature of his films. Fritz the Cat was the iconic character created by cult cartoonist Robert Crumb and Bakshi turned this disturbing underground cartoon into the first $100 million animated hit. Bakshi has repeatedly stated the film was everything a studio wanted; a money making art film that most critics liked. Bakshi has even stated that after Fritz the Cat studios essentially gave him carte blanche in the hopes he would turn out another financial smash, but as it became increasingly evident that his films were so cutting edge as to not appeal to mainstream crowds they (the studios) quickly reduced his indulgences. Which brings us to Cool World.

By the time Bakshi made Cool World in 1992 he had already been retired from making animated films for close to a decade. Tired of dealing with increasingly harsh studio restrictions, Bakshi chose instead to become a painter. But when painting proved to be much less then lucrative for him, Bakshi decided to give animated film making one more try. Unfortunately, Cool World would end up being the final nail in his directorial coffin.

For Cool World Bakshi originally pitched the idea for a horror film about an artist (Brad Pitt) who seduces one of his own illustrated creations. When the artist discovers the cartoon is pregnant from the encounter he rejects both the mother and the baby and goes into hiding. When the baby is born she is neither human nor cartoon, but rather a bastardized version of both. Furious at her father for abandoning them, the girl (Drew Barrymore) would travel to the real world in an attempt to murder her deadbeat father. The studio (Paramount Pictures) loved the idea and green lit the project with Bakshi writing the script and directing the film. Only unbeknownst to Bakshi the films producer, Frank Mancuso Jr, had a very different plan for the film.

When Bakshi turned up for the first day of shooting he was finally let in on Mancuso Jr’s plan. Without his knowledge Mancuso Jr had hired two writers (Michael Grais and Mark Victor) to rewrite the entire script. The story was now about an artist who is seduced by one of his own cartoons, the result of which brings about the end of the world. Gabriel Byrne was now cast illustrator as cartoonist Jack Deebs, while Drew Barrymore’s role was rewritten and given instead to Kim Basinger. Brad Pitt was kept on but recast in a supporting role as Frank Harris, a man who was unwittingly brought to Cool World as a youth and who now works as a police officer.

Bakshi was understandably furious that his film had gone through a wholesale transformation without his consent. What was originally conceived as an existential horror film on the nature of humanity with a heavy side helping of revenge had instead become a light facsimile of the mainstream blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Bakshi even has admitted to flying into a rage when he discovered the coup and almost proudly admits to punching Mancuso Jr. in the mouth in retaliation.

But the interference didn’t end there. Kim Basinger, easily the biggest star in the cast and at the time someone who could pull considerable weight when it came to filming, attempted her own re-write of the film midway through production, envisioning a sweet children’s tale that she could show in hospitals to sick children. Bakshi, dumbfounded at yet another mutiny, instead replied “Kim, I think that’s wonderful, but you’ve got the wrong guy to do that with.” And thus, with the film quickly becoming the classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen, Cool World was born. It isn’t difficult to surmise at this point what inevitably results. With so little direction and focus, it is a terrible mess, almost impressively so.

Character development is frightfully non-existent and there is never a single explanation offered as to their individual character traits and actions. Why does Holli Would (Basinger) want to become human? Because she does. Why does Deebs want to sleep with a cartoon he “fathered”? Because he does. And why does Harris safeguard a world he never wanted to be in to begin with? Because he does. The closest thing to character development is the tragedy that befalls Harris in the opening scene, yet it doesn’t actually explain how the incident teleports him to Cool World and the film later undercuts the entire sequence when it clumsily reveals that the scene only exists as a shabbily concocted deus ex machina for Harris to return to the really real world.

Which brings me to the question of just how the characters are able to transport between the two worlds. Cool World infers early on that a special machine, a literal magic spark, is required. Yet Holli Would can magically appear in Deebs’ dreams whenever she desires him to return to Cool World. Deebs, for his part, seems utterly capable of visiting Cool World only when he has a wet dream. Yet when Holli Would finally becomes a Noid (short for humanoid I presume, though like everything else in Cool World, the meaning is never actually explained) she and Deebs rather easily travel to the real world, while Harris must conjure up the memory of his earlier fate which magically teleports him back. The entire concept is stupifyingly stupid.

But wait, there is plenty more. At one point Harris chastises Deebs for bringing a fountain pen into Cool World. When Deebs questions what could be the danger in bringing such an innocuous object with him, Harris demonstrates its potentially dangerous usage by sticking the tip in a vase, then squirting ink into the air which Harris’ deputy proceeds to drink. Harris then emphatically punctuates the demonstration with an emphatic “Get it?” Well no, I don’t. And when Deebs professes the same confusion as me all Harris has to say is “Of course you don’t get it.” To which I can only respond, touche!

There are plenty more head scratching moments as well, Holli Would at one point begins turning back into a Doodle (a colorful Cool World colloquialism for I don’t know what), only she turns into a completely different cartoon then what she was originally. Another character also struggles with remaining human, but when they finally become a Doodle they also are a remarkably different version of their previous cartoon selves. And broaching into minor spoiler territory, one character is killed in the real world, but later when it is revealed that the killer was a Doodle the victim suddenly and inexplicably comes back to life, only this time as a Doodle. Why does this happen? Because Cool World can.

This constant mishmash of ideas and half-hearted plot resolutions is the most obvious obstacle the Cool World is unable to overcome. Rather then have any clear direction for the story, Cool World simply follows whichever direction pops into view. And once the film inevitably paints itself into a corner it simply jumps over to the next tangent, quickly forgetting to ever shore up the previous one. It’s plot by numbers, only without the plot and  using indecipherable Chinese numerals to guide the film in any sensible or coherent direction.

But there is something redeeming about Cool World, as hard as that might be to comprehend, and that is the art direction. In a surprising twist the realm of Cool World is composed of entirely two dimensional sets. Buildings, lamp posts and other objects are flat set pieces illustrated to look like a real world item. It gives Cool World a fascinating look and feel that is odd and strangely compelling for every precious moment spent in that bizarre world. Unfortunately, the artistic choice is inevitably spoiled when Harris starts driving around in a car that is actually a car, rather than a 2-D representation of one. I think I speak for everyone that if they used a 2-D prop of a car for Harris to cruise around the streets of Cool World it would have provided the only truly enjoyable moments of entertainment in the entire film.

But no, Cool World once again seems perfectly content to muddle along with the hypocritical mess that saturates every level of the production, blissfully unaware of what a waste of time it is for the viewers foolish enough to sit through this disaster. Thus leaving only the back story to fascinate and both titillate audiences on just what might have been.