Fritz the Cat: Duke's Death & The Bombing of Harlem

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• published: 16 Aug 2014
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Most cartoonmakers have not even attempted anything like what Bakshi attempted in Fritz. Traditionally, animation has been devoted to bringing to life characters who seemed to embody a wide variety of human experiences; they did not so much live in the world as carry it within them. In this respect, the animated cartoons of the thirties and forties were very much the heirs of the silent comedies of earlier decades. However, sometimes, even when the individual scenes are adequate, the editing—and here Bakshi is clearly to blame—is deadly. This happens during the Harlem riot, which is crudely conceived and even more crudely executed. Bakshi asks his audience to accept the bombing of Harlem—which is asking a lot—but the riot does not grow in a way that would make the bombing seem inevitable, rather than ludicrous. The editing reduces the violence to fragments, and so the political point that Bakshi wanted to make (which is underlined by a shot of the silhouetted figures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck cheering the jets on) is presented to us naked. In "Fritz Bugs Out," there are hints of the future in Fritz's dabbling in radical politics (i.e., exhorting the poor to revolt) and his encounter with marijuana, and these elements are greatly magnified in "Fritz the No-Good." The sense of separation is much deeper in "No- Good," even though Fritz himself is still apolitical; he is as much a dabbler in radical politics in "No-Good" as he was in "Fritz Bugs Out.'" If Fritz were still a college student in "No-Good,'" he probably would be emulating other students, just as he was in "Fritz Bugs Out," but he would be different because the pace-setting students were so much different in 1968 from those of a few years earlier. Many of the most important students of the late 1960s were distinguished by their willful ignorance—their conviction that a rotting society had nothing to teach them that could be worth learning. Since knowledge was readily available to them, they had to consciously reject it. This gave the young radicals of the late Sixties their distinctive tone: an oddly corrupt naiveté. If Bakshi had caught that tone in Fritz's voice—and in the film as a whole—he would really have had something. Many other characters are handled just as clumsily. For example, the pig policemen are comic bunglers on the order of the Three Stooges most of the time (Bakshi even called them "lovable cops" in one interview), and it is hard to accept the deaths of these two slapstick comedians at the hands of a mob of murderous crows. Even worse, Duke's death should be affecting, since Duke is a sympathetic character; the sequence in which he is shot and dies has in fact been singled out by many people as one of the best in the movie. That's true, but for me, the effects in the sequence come perilously close to dominating the character. The central image is fine: pool balls bounce, in order, into blood-red holes as Duke dies. But there are too many such devices—multiple images, a "cracking" yellow eye, a shot straight up at Duke as he dies—and Duke himself is almost obscured by them. It's as if Bakshi didn't trust the strength of his basic idea—the pool balls—and fussed over it, like an amateur artist adding "shading" to a good drawing. For the most part, Bakshi had trouble handling really strong emotions. Whether he was depicting them—or trying to evoke them in his audience, as with Duke's death—his efforts usually fell short. He would trip over something like the gimmicks in the death sequence, and we would be left tantalizingly close to animation of real depth and power. But sometimes, in sequences that were less demanding, Bakshi broke through, and everything fell into place. It is here that we get some sense of what the more important sequences would have been like if Bakshi had been able to make them as good as he obviously wanted them to be. The "Winston Schwartz" number, for instances, reproduces beautifully the harshness of an urban highway at night, and does it with animation; there is nothing about this sequence, with its bright colors and bullying trucks, that suggests live action. Later in the film, the meeting of the revolutionaries in the mausoleum is thick with a fear and apprehension that builds as the sequence progresses. Such episodes would be much more impressive in a better movie, but they at least suggest how much unused power rests in traditional animation's hands. [Original article © 1973 Michael Barrier]