Fritz the Cat (1972)

Thanks for the memories!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

I love this movie. What can I say? Well, I can't say it's exempt from criticism; the film has its flaws, both technically and chronologicaly, but it's enjoyable, at least, for me. Plus, the score is pretty good. "You're the only girl (I've ever really loved)" is a beautiful song; it really sets the mood for a movie about the city, the grimy life of Fritz as a college student, experimentation with sex and drugs, ect, and all while keeping with an early 40s type jazz sound. The other tracks are great too, especially the opening track, although the lyrics are a bit cheesy (but it's still fun and brings back some Janis Joplin esc vibes with it). The overall plot of the movie is blurry and is more of a mash up of different scenes and arcs from the original comics by Robert Crumb, but if you're looking for something sarcastic and offensive with a psychedelic twist, this one is for you. That being said, the film is not perfect and, in some ways, dated by it's politics and social commentary, so it must be viewed through the lenses of the time period in which it was made, as well as with context from the original comics. On a side note, I've heard people theorize that this movie influenced furries and furry culture. Hm.

Trippy, funny, smart, political, and hot. i was impressed with how much i liked the film given the meh ratings. the proto furryism in the movie was interesting to.

I decided to watch Fritz the Cat because I'm a fan of R. Crumb's work, and his infamous hatred towards this movie further fueled my intrigue. I think subversive animation inherently titillates the little kid in all of us, taking a widely beloved medium of our childhood and doing very "mature" (at least ratings wise) things with them. Ralph Bakshi, the director, proclaimed that his film was for the young people, the hippie generation, who weren't easily offended and were receptive to new ideas. The question then, however, is if this is true, why does he spend so much time lampooning them? The way this film portrays the radical left of the 60s and 70s is hilariously inaccurate as a whole and more indicative of the "everyone can identify as who they want to" neoliberalism of modern day. The liberals (all females I might add) in this film mainly exist as strawmen for some unspecified demographic to laugh at and think, "wow, liberal girls are so dumb, they literally only think that stuff to pick up guys!" And therein lies the main problem with this film. If you have a problem with the left, fine, but say it in an intelligent way. This movie is supposed to undermine the mainstream view of established groups in society--hippies, cops, blacks--but instead of being clever or profound, it just presents the caricatures to say "HA! AREN'T COPS SO DUMB!" "AREN'T WOMEN SO FICKLE!" It's exhausting and drains the humor out of damn near everything in here. Stereotypes ≠ does not a witty commentary on society make. There is one scene that I thought might have some insightful symbolism if one looked into it enough: Fritz incites a riot in Harlem against the cops. As the military is coming in and Fritz sees all the crows (puerile caricature for every single black person in the movie) around him dying, he essentially shrugs and walks off. Make of that what you will about race relations in the US, but in Fritz, you can pretty much guess the whole point of this scene was to have lots of cartoon violence. After all, the whole appeal of this movie is staying up past your bedtime to watch a naughty cartoon.Which leads me to that infamous X rating. If you're even a casual watcher of Family Guy, Fritz the Cat won't make you blink twice. Heck, if you're a hardcore Family Guy viewer, you'll probably love this film. The entire premise of the humor seems to evolve around anime tiddies, crudely drawn male genitals urinating everywhere, drugs, rape, violence, and stereotypes that aren't so much offensive now as just...tired and groan-worthy. It's ostensibly a parody of free love philosophy, but I'm not buying it. A large part of it might be that this movie is very, very considerably before my time. But it's hard to take this movie as a serious emblem of the counterculture when it treats nothing with respect. All of the women are either vapid, nagging, or whores. Somehow race exists in this animal world, and every thing that isn't white gets its own species. Characters are simultaneously Marxist and avid supporters of domestic violence, pro-revolutionary and Neonazi. The internal world has no consistency and as a result it's a jumbled mess and I feel like I wasted 82 minutes of my life. I guess it would be a deep philosophical commentary on something if literally anything, anything at all, about this film at least tried to be mature in tone at any point? Man, we get it, the 60s were strange, dude. Didn't need to watch an unfunny movie to glean that. I may sound scathing, but there are two things that may redeem this movie to people who care more than me. The animation in this movie is faithful to the eclectic style of Crumb and has stunningly innovative moments that would be poetic if the surrounding film wasn't...well, crap. The music is also really good, and sadly more fun than anything else in the movie. Fritz the Cat is probably worth watching if you're an animated historian or avid hentai fan. Other than that, though, there are better relics from the 70s that are faithful to the time period and actually funny, too.

I don't respect anyone who hasn't seen Fritz The Cat. Way way before The Simpsons and The Family Guy, this dirty intellectual cat, who's prone to smoking bongs and involving himself in orgies, created quite an uproar. This very clever animation, not for kiddies, shows this naughty cat get into some real mischief, one party where two cops (of course looking like pigs), are called out, one of them horny. One of the V.O's here sounds like Brad Garrett. Fritz and his girl take off. His car runs out of petrol. Real cool about it, as nothing really phases Fritz, he heads off on his journey. The finale where Fritz blows himself up, and surviving, really goes to prove, that cats do have nine lives, and where stitched up in hospital, he doesn't let this deter him in his sexploits. The script runs deep in potent dialogue, dealing with real issues of the sixties as if all the animated characters were real. But really, I think a lot of us just want to see some cats get it on and be amused at the same time. A comic adult romp, of cult status. Watch at your own risk.