Movies - Fritz the Cat

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	Movies - Fritz the Cat

Fritz the Cat is a 1972 animated film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi. Based on the comic books by Robert Crumb, the film was the first animated feature film to receive an X rating in the United States. The film is a satire on American college life of the 1960s: while Fritz doesn't attend any classes during the movie, he participates in major social upheavals based around the popular college protest movement of the time.

Producer Steve Krantz saw potential in Bakshi's vision for animated films specifically for adults. Having sold Krantz the production and distribution for what was to become the 1973 Bakshi feature, Heavy Traffic
, Krantz told Bakshi to make a film adapted from another author's work before moving on to his original work. Bakshi agreed, and the two searched for the perfect project.

In 1969, Krantz discovered a large paperback book containing three stories from Robert Crumb's anthropomorphic 1960s comic book Fritz the Cat, a character Crumb partially based on himself. Later that year, Krantz and Bakshi got in touch with Crumb and paid his way from his home north of San Francisco to New York, in order to talk with him about getting the film rights to the characters.

After several meetings, Krantz received a contract, signed by Crumb, in the mail, and that in return Crumb received twelve thousand five hundred dollars, which will be supplemented by a percentage of the film's gross proceeds. With the rights to the character, Krantz and Bakshi set out to find a distributor. "When I say that every major distributor turned it down, this is not an exaggeration," remembers Krantz.

In the spring, Warner Bros. agreed to distribute the film and to provide money for making the picture. Late in November, Bakshi and Krantz had made a presentation reel containing a few minutes of finished animation, pencil tests, and shots of some of Bakshi's storyboards made to show to Warner Bros, who wanted movie stars' voices for the characters and also wanted him to tone down the material, removing the explicit sex in a scene with Fritz and Bertha the crow. Bakshi and Krantz left Warner Bros., taking their project with them. The distribution and financing problems were also cleared up late in 1970, when Cinemation Industries attached themselves to the project and Fantasy Records agreed to help fund the film.

When Crumb saw the final product, he was displeased. Crumb tried to sue the film's distributors to have his name taken off of the credits , but failed. He later claimed in interviews that the project was "an embarrassment to him," that he never wanted the film made, and that "I wrote them a letter telling them not to use any more of my characters in their films." Still, despite Crumb's objections, Fritz the Cat was a box office smash hit, drawing in audiences as much for its shock value as for its appeal to the "love generation" of the 1960s.

The film made $25 million in the United States, and $90 million worldwide. The film's success lead to a slew of other "X rated and animated" films, including Dirty Duck
and Bakshi's own film Heavy Traffic
. There was also a sequel called The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat
, which neither Crumb nor Bakshi had anything to do with. In 2004, Fritz the Cat landed at number 56 on Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Cartoons.

Source Stories

Fritz the Cat is adapted from the following R. Crumb stories:

Fritz Bugs Out--first serialized in the February to October 1968 issues of Cavalier

Fritz the Cat--first published in R. Crumb's Head Comix, 1968.

Fritz the No-Good--first published in the September/October issue of Cavalier.

Plot Overview

The film begins with a typically Bakshian piece of dialogue: three construction workers on their lunch break talk about how they spend so much money to send their children to college, only to instead find out that the kids instead spend all of their time drinking booze, smoking marijuana, and screwing each other. One construction worker gets up to take a piss off of the scaffold, the urine landing on the head of a hippie with a guitar.

We switch over to the New York City park, where various hippies are gathered with guitars to sing protest songs. Fritz and his buddies show up in an attempt to get laid. Three girls show up, and walk right past them, instead taking up a conversation with a crow, trying to impress him with their knowledge of black history, but he blows them off.

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Movies - Fritz the Cat

Source Stories

Plot Overview

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