A World So Hot It's Cool

What is the dynamic between fantasy and reality? Can it really be consistently broken down into moral or psychological ideas of escapism versus responsibility? Perhaps its more complicated, and messier, than that, so maybe it's appropriate that 1992's Cool World is such a messy film. A story about intercourse (in more ways than one) between a cartoon world and a live action world, it at least has a captivating, authentic artistic voice from director Ralph Bakshi. The art design is a fascinatingly grotesque phantasmagoria and the performances aren't really bad. A lot of the live action footage feels like test footage, though, and, especially in the middle portion of the film, there's a sense of too many cooks invading the kitchen. The story becomes almost incoherent, a side effect being that the villain played by a very young Brad Pitt becomes far more interesting than the hero.

The movie starts out following his character, Frank Harris, in 1945, returning from World War II and surprising his mother with a new motorcycle.

I really like this opening. The fact that he expects his mother to be excited about a shiny red motorcycle seems like a credible misread of his own instincts for a young man: he thinks motorcycles are cool, so of course his mom will, too.

There's an accident and he winds up in "Cool World", an animated alternate reality. Nearly fifty years later, we see he's become a cop.

Cool World is populated by random, ridiculous cartoon antics, bombshell babes, and demonaic buildings. It's a pretty competently designed Hell of stimulation, especially since all the titillation comes with a rule against consummation. This bugs Holli Would (Kim Basinger), the queen bee of the bombshells, who really wants to be real.

She soliloquises about it, talking about how "noids"--live action people--are able to have physical sensations, implying she can't. She wants to have sex and sex operates both as surface and symbol--she wants the intimacy which fantasy creatures like her are designed to be compensations for the lack of.

Gabriel Byrne plays Jack and it's with his character that the film really shows its shortcomings. He's a cartoonist who thinks he created Holli Would--he has a popular comic series about her. We meet him in prison, where he's drawing her to mentally escape his isolation. We learn later he was imprisoned for killing his wife but we never learn if he actually did it or why he was released from prison. It feels like there are quite a few scenes about Jack just missing, particularly in the middle of the film where he and Holli have sex, resulting in her becoming a noid.

Wikipedia says Kim Basinger tried to take control of the film to make it more kid friendly, which would explain why the first outfit she wears as live action Holli looks like it belongs on a kid's show. She goes through four rapid, inexplicable costume changes when she and Jack are transported to Earth, which I suspect were the product of behind the scenes arguments.

She veers from toddler amusement park guide to tramp before finally settling on something like the animated Holli's outfit she ought to have been wearing from the beginning.

All the same, I don't think Basinger gives a bad performance. Holli idolises Marilyn Monroe and Basinger does a pretty credible reproduction of Monroe's mannerisms. Her motives are really intriguing, too, as one wonders what exactly her pursuit of reality means to her. By the end, she's pursuing something like an ultimate power source, but maybe this is the best way her cartoon mind can interrupt her own needs. There's something truly tragic about it. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt's character inhabits the same world as though it's an extension of the psychological trauma from his mother's death. It's subtle and surprisingly effective.

It's a shame the eyelines so infrequently match up--Bakshi didn't have the resources Roger Rabbit had. But I certainly can't fault the design.

Cool World is available on Amazon Prime.

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Wardrobe for Any Climate Extreme

If there's one thing fantasy has taught us it's that hot and cold don't get along, a thematic struggle perhaps best distilled in Ralph Bakshi's 1983 film Fire and Ice. Bakshi's infamous rotoscope animation technique gets a big aesthetic boost for designs by Frank Frazetta. Along with Bakshi's great talent as a filmmaker, the film has plenty of good qualities to make it a simple, stimulating variation on classic themes.

At the end of an Ice Age, everyone already dresses like it's the Amazon rain forest--the movie might've been called Thongs and Loincloths. This is pretty normal for Frazetta's artwork, though, and his stylised studies of anatomy are one of the great things about his work. The rotoscope technique, which involves animators drawing over filmed live action, is sadly particularly ill-suited to replicating Frazetta's style. Attempts by the animators to exaggerate physical features are never consistent, creating weirdly wobbling contours. The lack of shading too often reduces body parts to amorphous blobs.

On the other hand, the backgrounds are gorgeous and colour choices are top notch. I love how often the filmmakers achieve interesting contrasts, typically between dark foreground characters and bright backgrounds.

This goes some way towards making up for the absence of the distinctive shading in Frazetta's art. The story is about contrast, of course, but it never wearies the viewer with exposition on the topic. Massive walls of ice under the command of the villainous Nekron (Sean Hannon [body] and Stephon Mendel [voice]) are threatening the lands inhabited by tribes of scantily clad humans. Our two protagonists have never met as the story opens, coming from two different realms--a warrior named Larn (Randy Norton and William Ostrander) and a princess named Teegra (Cynthia Leake and Maggie Roswell).

Teegra, first seen squirming happily on a divan, is the pampered royalty while Larn is a man of the wilderness and war. Both represent aspects of the physical compared to the icy Nekron, who seems bored by his mother's scheme to have him marry Teegra. But Teegra is kidnapped for the purpose by Nekron's orcs (or "sub-humans") who for the most part don't seem especially turned on by Teegra, either. Happily, the filmmakers repeatedly show us what the orcs are missing.

The story of how Larn and Teegra meet and deal with Nekron's forces is nicely inventive and never falls mindlessly into typical plot patterns. Her efforts to escape come off as credible which she succeeds or fails and her first meeting with Larn has a nice awkwardness to it that nonetheless establishes a certain nobility of nature in both characters.

The film's extreme fantasy atmosphere often reminds me of Lovecraft's Dreamlands, particularly some flying beasts that Larn and his mentor, Darkwolf (Steve Sandor, body and voice), ride near the film's climax. The shortcomings of the rotoscope are before very long eclipsed by the great virtues of this film. You can currently stream it in HD on Amazon Prime.

It was ten years ago I had one of my more memorable experiences at Comic-Con when I saw Ralph Bakshi as a panel of one. I wrote about it in this 2008 entry. Among other things, he told a story about Fire and Ice that remains one of my absolute favourites about any movie production:

Painting backgrounds on the movie were a young James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade. Apparently, according to Bakshi, they learned all they knew about painting from Frazetta, which is hilarious in itself. "Kinkade makes a lot of money off garbage now," said Bakshi, at which point the room applauded. "But I will say this for Kinkade; he was the greatest hustler I ever met."

He described Kinkade constantly coming into his office and demanding more money, and they'd get into really heated arguments partly because, as Bakshi said, Kinkade "didn't like Jewish guys from Brooklyn" (Bakshi's a Jewish guy from Brooklyn). Finally, one day Kinkade tells Bakshi he and Gurney have to hitchhike across the country. "What d'you mean you gotta hitchhike across the country? We're making a movie!"

But Kinkade eventually wore Bakshi down, and he and Gurney went from town to town getting their pictures in every local paper, talking about the movie and how they were the great artists. When they got back to Los Angeles, Bakshi said Kinkade, "told me he needed a raise. I said, 'why' and he said because he's famous now."

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