Fritz The Cat

The film begins with the written words, "The 1960's," and a voice-over narrator stating, "Hey, yeah, the 1960s? Happy times, heavy times," paraphrasing "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," the opening of Charles Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities. An ink drawing of a New York City street appears, which then turns to color as street noises are heard on the soundtrack. The camera pans up toward a girder high above the street, where construction workers are seated, eating lunch. One worker complains that he brought up his daughter in the bourgeois way and sent her to college, only to have her announce that she is living with a man. As the men discuss the idea of "free love" and rioting by young people that has been in the news, one of the workers urinates off the girder onto the street below. The talking continues, along with soundtrack music, as the opening credits appear. Afterward, a pedestrian is knocked down by the stream of urination and the story commences.
       According to the onscreen credits, the original soundtrack was by Fantasy Studios. Although the film was not registered with the copyright office at the time of its release, the end credits include a 1972 copyright statement for "Fritz Productions for Aurica Finance Co." and the film was registered on February 24, 2000 under the number RE-827-085.
       All of the characters in the animated film are depicted as cartoon animals. Fritz and his college friends are most often drawn as cats, dogs and other furry creatures, while the police are shown as pigs, Jews in the synagogue sequence are hounds and African Americans are crows. Often these caricatures are intended as a reflection of the superficiality of the title character "Fritz." The characters swear and take drugs, are often shown nude, with genitalia, and they frequently engage in what MPAA director Aaron Stern, according to a May 1972 Variety article, termed "anthropomorphic intercourse."
       According to a Rampart article, the film Fritz The Cat was loosely based on three and one half specific comic strips by satirical artist and illustrator Robert Crumb (1943-). Crumb, whose books were usually signed R. Crumb, was a founder of the underground comix movement. His work has become iconic of the late 1960s popular counterculture. He created the character "Fritz the Cat," as well as, among other things, the comic book character "Mr. Natural," an album cover for rock star Janis Joplin and the "Keep on Truckin'" drawing that appeared widely in the late 1960s and early 1970s as decals and in print. Crumb's drawing style is sexual and subversive, sometimes incorporating biographical elements and generally parodying American culture and the shallowness of middle-class counterculture Although, according to modern sources, Crumb's artistic development. was influenced by the satirical cartoon artists of 1930s comics (among them, Barney Google, Popeye, Little Lulu and Little Orphan Annie), Crumb's cartoons emerged at a time when cartoons influenced by the popularity of the Walt Disney animated feature films were the norm. According to a December 2001 Los Angeles Times article, Crumb's caricatures of "stoned" college students were "novel and scandalous" in 1972. Although some critics have labeled Crumb's work variously as immature, misogynistic, racist and pornographic, others have praised him as an important satirist of the twentieth century.
       Fritz The Cat was the first project of Steve Krantz Productions, Inc. According to a September 1971 Los Angeles Times article, forty-seven-year-old Krantz was a former head of sales at Columbia's television unit, Screen Gems. His partner Ralph Bakshi, the thirty-one-year-old former head of animation at Paramount and director of CBS Terrytoons, was vice-president in charge of the creative side of the business and served as writer-director on the film, which also was his first. In a September 1971 Los Angeles Times article, Bakshi stated that he wanted to capitalize on the "graphic arts explosion in terms of animation" and wanted to create a "realistic animated feature" about city life. He compared newspaper cartooning, which he called political art, to animation, which he believed also had the potential to be socially relevant. In the article, he explained that at first backers balked at his new concept and that animators, who had grown used to "drawing pretty bunnies kissing beautiful butterflies," sometimes showed resistance. He and Krantz personally funded the project until Fantasy Records and Cinemation Industries financed the remainder of the film's million-dollar budget.
       As noted in a December 1971 Los Angeles Times article, the animation industry was suffering hard times, generally providing screen cartoonists employment only six months of the year and the cartoonists' union was decrying a trend of "runaway production[s]." The article reported that when Krantz moved his entire operation from New York to Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, he was welcomed by the animation industry "with open arms." The September 1971 Los Angeles Times article reported that Krantz employed a staff of twenty-five animators, and a Rampart article stated that before the production was complete, the staff fluctuated to as many as seventy-five workers, among them, animators, colorists, artist, photographers, musicians and sound technicians. According to the Rampart and a December 1971 Los Angeles Times article, four animators quit during production of Fritz The Cat, uncomfortable either with the sexually graphic depiction of the characters or the film's depiction of women and ethnic groups.
       A frequently used transitional device of the film was to show a cityscape, often from an aerial view, before moving into the action of the story. As noted in Filmfacts, many of the film's impressionistic watercolor backgrounds were derived from actual street scene photographs. Many of the original photographs of Harlem and East Greenwich Village, New York neighborhoods, which a September 1971 Los Angeles Times article reported were taken by Bakshi, appear during the end credits. Referring to the photographs and the cartoon settings based on them, a July 15, 1971 Hollywood Reporter news item reported that the filmmakers quipped that Fritz The Cat was the first picture to be filmed on location in Harlem.
       According to the Rampart article, Bakshi aimed to have realistic, "non-cartooned" voices for the characters. A July 1971 Hollywood Reporter news item reported that Bakshi, while in New York, recorded real conversations in Harlem bars. September 1971 Los Angeles Times and Rampart articles reported that Bakshi spent days recording the conversations of construction workers talking in a deli, hippies, bikers, winos and members of a synagogue, all of whom were used in the soundtrack of the film and were paid for their services. For the bathtub sequence, according to the Rampart article, Bakshi invited three young women to a small party to record their conversation. For the dialogue of the policemen, Bakshi's voice was used for the rookie, and a friend, who claimed he had always wanted to be a policeman, provided the voice for the veteran cop. For the part of Fritz, Bakshi hired Skip Hinnant, who had portrayed "Schroeder" in the original cast of the off-Broadway musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. According to a May 1972 Variety article, Fritz The Cat took two-and-a-half years to complete.
       A September 1971 Los Angeles Times article reported that the film contained "enough 'X' material to make Minnie Mouse...gasp." However, according to a May 1972 Variety article, Krantz and Bakshi were unhappy with the X rating, which was awarded by the MPAA because of the orgy scenes at the beginning and end of the film. Concerned about the reduction in box office potential that the X rating would generate, Bakshi and Krantz took out ads in Los Angeles Times and San Francisco newspapers that reported on the favorable notices of several well-known film critics. Their distributor, Jerry Gross of Cinemation Industries, who deliberately had exploited the rating by advertising the film as "The World's First X-Rated Full-Length Cartoon," took offense, claiming that his company had sole booking and ad jurisdiction for the film. According to a June 1972 Daily Variety news item, Krantz appealed the rating, but the MPAA refused to overturn their original decision. Despite the filmmakers' concerns about the picture's financial viability, according to an October 1973 Hollywood Reporter news item, the film had grossed $30 million worldwide to that date.
       Fritz The Cat was screened at the Cannes, Dallas and USA Film Festivals and was shown as part of a series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although the film was controversial and garnered mixed reviews, a New York Times review described it as "an accurate evocation of what the world was like a few years ago in the area...between St. Mark's Place and Washington Square South" and the Los Angeles Times reviewer called the film an "ambitious social commentary, a caustic animated tour of the issues and changes which marked the United States in the 1960s." As noted in a January 1988 Los Angeles Times article, the film brought sex, drugs, violence and counterculture rhetoric of the underground "comix" to the screen.
       According to June 1971 Daily Variety and September 1971 Los Angeles Times news items, Bakshi and Krantz had planned two other feature-length cartoons, Arrivederci, Rudy, which was to be based on the life of silent film actor Rudolf Valentino, and Dick Tracy, Frozen, Fried and Buried Alive; however, these projects never reached fruition. In 1973, Krantz and Bakshi released another animated feature, Heavy Traffic, which was written and directed by Bakshi, and, in 1974, Krantz alone released a sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, which was directed by Robert Taylor and written by Taylor, Eric Monte and Fred Halliday, and again featured Hinnant in the title role.
       An August 1973 Variety article reported that Cinemation sold its U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to the Dutch-owned holding company Aurica Finance. In July 1980, a Daily Variety news item reported that Bakshi filed suit against Krantz's company, asking for an accounting of the profits and an unspecified amount in damages from Fritz The Cat and Heavy Traffic, claiming that his contract called for a ten percent cut of the profits and the last payment he had received was in June 1978. According to a December 2001 Los Angeles Times article, Crumb, who reportedly despised the film portrayals of his character, drew Fritz in later comix as a drunken and debauched Hollywood star and eventually wrote a story in which the cat is murdered by an ex-girl friend.