Cool World: Ralph Bakshi’s Black Sheep

Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m telling you about a movie I’ve just seen. If I were to tell you that it was an animated/live-action film noir starring Brad Pitt, set in a dark and dangerous world that was basically “Toontown meets Vegas meets Hell”, you might rightfully think this was a pretty cool picture. Unfortunately, once you actually got around to seeing it for yourself you would almost certainly be disappointed with the result. Such is the case with one of the weirdest, wildest animated films to come out of the ’90s, Cool World.

Cool World is a movie I have a complicated relationship with. It’s an obviously flawed film, preserving its creator’s subversive streak but drowning out his signature voice and the social commentary that was central to his best films, and the experience making it permanently soured its creator on working with Hollywood—and despite said flaws, it’s one that I happen to have a particular soft spot for.

To understand Cool World, first you have to be familiar with one name: Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi is a pioneer in the field of animation, almost singlehandedly creating the idea of animation that was aimed strictly at adults. If it wasn’t for the subversive work that Bakshi has done, we likely wouldn’t have the likes of The Simpsons, South Park, Rick and Morty, or really any animation that’s aimed strictly at a grown-up audience.

His first film Fritz the Cat was the first X-rated animated picture, simply because at the time there was no concept of animation for adults, and to this day is the most successful independent animated feature of all time. He went on to make several more seminal pieces of adult animation, including Heavy Traffic, American Pop and Coonskin. His series Spicy City on HBO was the first “adults only” animated series, coming a little over a month before the premiere of South Park—stuff like Liquid Television had previously existed but wasn’t explicitly marketed as being for adults. And Cool World was the last feature film Bakshi would ever make, with his experience making it playing a big role in his decision to retire from the animation industry.

Cool World was a production that was seemingly doomed from the start. Bakshi had initially pitched the film as an R-rated horror movie that was a hybrid of live-action and animation, centered around an underground cartoonist who goes on to father a half-human, half-cartoon child that goes onto chase its father to the real world to confront and kill him. Paramount Pictures bought the idea, but producer Frank Mancuso Jr. decided that instead of going for a hard R, the film should instead aim for a PG rating to try and bank on the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. As Bakshi tells it, he was handed a new script on the first day of production, leading to him getting into a physical altercation with Mancuso—and being threatened by a potential lawsuit from Paramount if he didn’t complete the film.

Things only got more difficult from there. Bakshi had originally cast Brad Pitt in the role of Jack Deebs and Drew Barrymore as Holli Would, but the studio overruled him and instead cast Pitt as Frank Harris, Kim Basinger as Holli given that she was a bigger potential box office draw, and Gabriel Byrne as Deebs. According to Bakshi, Basinger herself attempted to rewrite the film about halfway through production because she “thought it would be great […] if she would be able to show this picture in hospitals to sick children […] I said, ‘Kim, I think that’s wonderful, but you’ve got the wrong guy to do that with.’”

After all the difficulties and conflicts that arose throughout production, it’s not really surprising that it feels like Bakshi mostly phoned it in on the film; in his own words “…I thought that maybe I could just have fun animating this stuff, which I did.” His animators never received a screenplay, simply being told to “do a scene that’s funny, whatever [they] want to do,” leading to the film’s overall lack of focus.

The first major problem with Cool World is that despite its intriguing premise, there’s very little in the way of actual plot stretched over an hour and a half of runtime. Things frequently spiral out into random tangents, and when the plot does reappear it’s usually introducing new elements that weren’t previously built up or hinted out. Holli initially only wants to be human and live in the human world, but when we get to the film’s climax it seems like her plan was to unleash the residents of Cool World into the human world with her. It’s not even really explained how getting it on with a human turns a doodle into a human, or how people even get to Cool World—at first, there’s a MacGuffin called the Spike of Power that seems central to moving between the worlds, but this is only remembered when the plot calls for it. There’s a lot that isn’t really explained in any meaningful way. Worst of all, after Holli finally does the deed with Deebs and becomes human, we follow her and Deebs to the real world, meaning that most of the last half of the film is stuck in the comparatively dull environment of real-world Las Vegas.

Performances are a mixed bag: Brad Pitt nails it as Harris, bringing a no-nonsense intensity to the role; Kim Basinger is exquisite as Holli—until she becomes human, when it turns into a standard “reading off cue cards” Basinger performance; and Gabriel Byrne is…there, there’s nothing really wrong with his performance, it just isn’t much of a performance at all, he’s kind of just there to be the means to an end for Holli.

Secondly, the film has one glaring technical issue that simply shouldn’t exist in a film of this nature, especially with a not insubstantial budget of $28 million: the compositing between the animation and live-action is not convincing in the slightest. That this comes a full four years after Who Framed Roger Rabbit had gone to painstaking lengths to make give its cartoon characters a real sense of physical space as they interacted with both live-action actors and objects is especially egregious. There’s other nitty-gritty stuff you notice throughout—in the scene where we’re first introduced to Holli, you can see the character being rendered in as we pan over to where she’s dancing, for instance—but even something like that isn’t as bad as having an immersion-breaking flaw in your film’s main draw.

And yet…

Despite everything wrong with the film, it’s one that I’ve watched again and again, and there’s a lot to like despite its flaws.

Visually, it’s one of the most jaw-droppingly exquisite films you’ll ever see. Cool World itself is a beautifully surreal psychedelic cross between a cartoon Vegas and cartoon hellscape. Buildings twist and turn around themselves as they stretch into the sky, many of them bearing gaping, disturbingly well-drawn human mouths. Roads are built with supports that bring them closer to roller coaster tracks. Garish neon signs constantly flicker with the temptation of whatever pleasure you want. The film also frequently makes use of live-action sets that look like living, walk-through paintings, a look Bakshi had long wanted to achieve. Characters are well animated, evoking several eras of classic animation, such as early era Fleischer insanity or Chuck Jones lunacy. Holli is a particular standout as an equal parts seductive and mildly deranged Jessica-Rabbit-for-grownups type with a feisty, bratty streak.

Even the film’s lack of plot and lack of focus winds up contributing to this general sense of lunacy. One could imagine a Cool World series that simply followed Harris trying to keep some sense of peace in this seedy, chaotic underworld with whatever new insanity was being thrown his way that day.

The film’s soundtrack and score are both killer. The score is a jazzy blend of big band tunes while the soundtrack is a veritable who’s who of ‘90s EDM and dance music, including an original song by David Bowie that was actually his first piece of solo material in roughly three years at the time. It’s certainly built for a particular time, but it’s a soundtrack that’s perfect for the hazy, trippy lunacy that’s central to the film’s mood.

So what is Cool World? Funny enough, the film itself winds up being close to what Bakshi had originally pitched: a half cartoon, half live-action abomination that’s roughly one-quarter Bakshi and seventy-five percent Mancuso and Basinger’s rewrites and retoolings. It’s a film that three different parties tried to take in a different direction, leading to something that didn’t appeal enough to any of the audiences they were trying to draw in. In perhaps a little bit of vindication for Bakshi, designer Milton Knight noted that the premiere audience he saw the film with was one of many that wanted a wilder, raunchier Cool World more in line with Bakshi’s original vision.