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The pungent zeitgeist, the wandering pussy. "Happy times, heavy times," Disney's pixie-dust is here one long piss from above. The phony-baloney poet is a New York hepcat on the prowl, existentialism is just the lingo to get coeds, into the bathtub goes the furry orgy. "Ever make it with an aardvark before?" Ralph Bakshi's X-rated animation of Robert Crumb's underground comics contemplates a randy and abrasive counterculture, with every critter looking for the next high. Out of the dorm and on the streets for the feline poseur, floating through the whole megillah of radicals, dropouts, porcine cops and dancing rabbis. Dumbo's jive crows register "the race problems," Fritz in Harlem gets the militant bug while boinking a bulbous mamma and cluelessly instigates a riot. (The most jolting sequence prods the war at home and audaciously connects it to Vietnam, military jets drop napalm on black neighborhoods while cheered on by Mickey and Donald in the shadows.) "Pink Elephants on Parade" via reefers, Bo Diddley and Billie Holiday for rhapsodic grunginess. "So here we are on the brink of the apocalypse, the eve of destruction so to speak... and I can't think of anything to do." The trip west leads to a scorched desert, the Easy Rider seeker has become a hophead bunny, the political consciousness turns out to be a lizard brain. Bakshi and Crumb locked horns during the project, yet the two share anger and rue over the Sixties' thwarted potential for change. ("The kitten will kill the lion," as Bukowski has it.) Amid the turmoil of changing epochs, Fritz finds elusive enlightenment not by blowing up factories but in the renewal of his raunchy appetites, a revolution of its own. "Marvelous my ass, this is exalting!" Voices include Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, and Judy Engles.
--- Fernando F. Croce |