Fritz the Cat (film)

Fritz the Cat
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ralph Bakshi
Screenplay by	Ralph Bakshi
Based on	Fritz the Cat by R. Crumb
Produced by	Steve Krantz
Starring	Skip Hinnant Rosetta LeNoire John McCurry Phil Seuling
Cinematography	Ted Bemiller Gene Borghi
Edited by	Renn Reynolds
Music by	Ed Bogas Ray Shanklin
Animation by	Manny Perez Art Vitello Phil Duncan Dick Lundy Virgil Ross Norm McCabe John Sparey George Griffin James Tyer John Gentilella Rod Scribner Ted Bonnicksen Cosmo Anzilotti Milton Gray John Walker Edward Aardal James Davis Robert Maxfield Nicholas Tafuri Clifford Auguston Lawrence Riley Martin Taras
Production companies	Fritz Productions Aurica Finance Company Krantz Films
Distributed by	Cinemation Industries
Release date	April 12, 1972 (1972-04-12)
Running time	78 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English Yiddish
Budget	$700,000
Box office	$90 million

Fritz the Cat is a 1972 American adult animated black comedy film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi in his directorial debut. Based on Robert Crumb's comic strip of the same name, the film focuses on its Skip Hinnant-portrayed titular character, a glib, womanizing and fraudulent cat in an anthropomorphic animal version of New York City during the mid-to-late 1960s. Fritz decides on a whim to drop out of college, interacts with inner city African American crows, unintentionally starts a race riot and becomes a leftist revolutionary. The film is a satire focusing on American college life of the era, race relations, and the free love movement, as well as serving as a criticism of the countercultural political revolution and dishonest political activists.

The film had a troubled production history, as Crumb, who is a leftist, had disagreements with the filmmakers over the film's political content, which he saw as being critical of the political left. Produced on a budget of US$700,000 (equivalent to $5.26 million in 2024), the film was intended by Bakshi to broaden the animation market. At that time, animation was primarily viewed as a children's medium. Bakshi envisioned animation as a medium that could tell more dramatic or satirical storylines with larger scopes, dealing with more mature and diverse themes that would resonate with adults.

The film's depiction of profanity, sex, and drug use, particularly cannabis, provoked criticism from more conservative members of the animation industry, who accused Bakshi of attempting to produce a pornographic animated film, as the concept of adult animation was not widely understood at the time. The Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an X rating (the predecessor of the NC-17 rating), making it the first American animated film to receive the rating, which was then predominantly associated with more arthouse films.

The film was highly successful, grossing over $90 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time. It earned significant critical acclaim in the 1970s, for its satire, social commentary and animations, despite attracting some negative response accusing it of racial stereotyping and having an unfocused plot, and criticizing its depiction of graphic violence, profanity, sex and drug use in the context of an animated film. The film's use of satire and mature themes is seen as paving the way for future animated works for adults, including The Simpsons and South Park.

A sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974), was produced without Crumb's or Bakshi's involvement.

Plot

Set in 1960s Manhattan, a group of hippies gather at a city park to perform protest songs. Fritz, an anthropomorphic tabby cat, arrives with his friends in an attempt to impress three girls, who instead show interest in an anthropomorphic crow standing nearby. In their effort to connect, the girls make unintentionally condescending remarks about black people. After the crow rebukes the girls and leaves, Fritz then presents himself as a troubled intellectual and invites the girls to "seek the truth" with him.

The group arrives at a friend’s apartment, where a party is taking place. Due to crowding in other rooms, Fritz drags the girls into the bathroom, where they engage in an orgy. Meanwhile, two NYPD pig officers arrive to crash the party. As they climb the stairs, a partygoer discovers the scene in the bathroom, prompting others to join. Fritz, marginalized in the crowded bathtub, turns to marijuana for comfort. When the police enter, one begins attacking the attendees. Seizing an opportunity, a dazed Fritz grabs the officer’s gun and accidentally shoots the toilet, breaking the water main and flooding the apartment. The chaos allows Fritz to flee, and he escapes into a synagogue. There, he blends into the congregation as they erupt in celebration over the U.S. decision to supply more weapons to Israel.

Fritz returns to his college dormitory, where his studious roommates ignore him. Disillusioned with academic life, he sets fire to his notes and textbooks, unintentionally igniting a blaze that consumes the entire building. Later, arriving at a Harlem bar, Fritz meets Duke the Crow at a pool table. After narrowly avoiding a fight with a bartender, Duke invites Fritz to “bug out,” and the pair steal a car. Fritz crashes the vehicle off a bridge but is saved by Duke. They make their way to the apartment of Bertha, a drug dealer whose potent cannabis enhances Fritz’s libido. During sex, Fritz claims he has discovered his purpose: to “tell the people about the revolution.” He runs into the street and incites a riot, eventually leading to Duke being shot and killed by police. The situation escalates, with the police and New York Air National Guard called in to suppress the uprising. The violence culminates in an airstrike, with F-104 fighter jets carpet-bombing Harlem as Disney characters cheer from the sidelines.

Fritz takes refuge in an alley, where he's found by his older fox girlfriend, who insists on taking him to San Francisco. When their car runs out of gas in the desert, Fritz abandons her, later encountering Blue, a drug-addicted rabbit biker, and his horse girlfriend, Harriet. The three travel to an underground bunker, where two revolutionaries—John, a hooded snake, and a female gecko known as the "lizard leader"—plan to bomb a power plant. When Harriet attempts to leave for a Chinese restaurant, Blue physically assaults her and restrains her with chains. Fritz intervenes, prompting the lizard leader to burn his face with a candle. Blue and the others then throw Harriet onto a bed and gang rape her. After the group plants dynamite at the power plant, Fritz experiences a change of heart and tries to disarm the explosives, but fails and gets caught in the resulting explosion.

Fritz is hospitalized in Los Angeles, heavily bandaged. Harriet, disguised as a nun, visits him alongside the three girls from the New York park. Believing Fritz to be nearly dying, they attempt to console him. However, Fritz revives and repeats the same speech he initially used to seduce them. The film ends with him engaging in sex with the trio, while Harriet looks on in disbelief.

Voice cast

• Skip Hinnant as Fritz the Cat
• Rosetta LeNoire as Bertha / Additional voices
• John McCurry as Duke the Crow / Bar Patron
• Phil Seuling as Ralph / Additional voices
• Judy Engles (uncredited) as Winston Schwartz / Lizard Leader
• Ralph Bakshi (uncredited) as Al / Narrator / Blue / John / Additional voices
• Mary Dean (uncredited) as Charlene / Dee Dee / Winston / Harriet

Background

R. Crumb first created Fritz the Cat in 1959 as a teenager, crafting stories with his older brother Charles for their self-published comic magazine. The character made his official debut in 1965 in Help!, a humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman. Crumb’s strips used anthropomorphic animals—typically associated with children's comics—to explore adult themes such as sex, drugs, and countercultural disillusionment. In 1967, Crumb left his wife and moved to San Francisco, immersing himself in the counterculture and experimenting with drugs like LSD. His work began appearing in underground publications, and in 1968, he released the first issue of Zap Comix. As his cartoons became increasingly transgressive, graphic, and provocative, Crumb emerged as a leading figure in the underground comix movement. Fritz quickly became one of his most recognizable characters, including mainstream audiences outside of the underground scene.

[The idea of] grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous.

—Ralph Bakshi, in a 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Times

The first panel from a 1968 strip of Fritz the Cat by Robert Crumb, which Bakshi later rediscovered and adapted into a film.

Ralph Bakshi, meanwhile, graduated from Manhattan's High School of Art and Design (then the School of Industrial Art) in 1956, earning an award in cartooning. He began his career at Terrytoons studio in New York City, where he spent a decade animating characters including Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Deputy Dawg. At 29, Bakshi briefly led the animation division of Paramount Pictures, directing four experimental short films before the division was shut down in 1967. He then met and formed a partnership with producer Steve Krantz to form Bakshi Productions. In 1969, a commercial division called Ralph's Spot was founded, producing content for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, an educational series for Encyclopædia Britannica. However, Bakshi felt creatively stifled and wanted to pursue more personal, ambitious projects. He developed Heavy Traffic, a tale of inner-city street life. However, Krantz told Bakshi that studio executives would be unwilling to fund the film because of its content and Bakshi's lack of film experience.

While browsing the East Side Book Store on St. Mark's Place, Bakshi discovered a copy of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat (1969). Impressed by Crumb's sharp satire, Bakshi purchased the book and proposed to Krantz that it could serve as the basis for a feature film. Believing Crumb's sensibilities aligned with his own, Bakshi wanted to direct it. Krantz arranged a meeting with Crumb, during which Bakshi presented sample drawings he had made in Crumb’s style, demonstrating his ability to faithfully adapt the work into animation. Impressed by Bakshi's tenacity, Crumb lent him one of his sketchbooks for reference.

As development began, a pitch package was assembled—including a painted cel over a photo background, showcasing Bakshi's vision for the film’s aesthetic. Though Crumb was initially enthusiastic, he ultimately declined to sign the contract, unsure about the film’s direction. Fellow cartoonist Vaughn Bodé warned Bakshi against working with Crumb, describing him as "slick". Bakshi later agreed with Bodé's assessment, calling Crumb "one of the slickest hustlers you'll ever see in your life". Krantz sent Bakshi to San Francisco, where Bakshi stayed with Crumb and his wife Dana, in hopes of persuading Crumb to sign the contract. After a week, Crumb left, leaving the film's production status uncertain, but since Dana had power of attorney, she signed the contract. Crumb received $50,000, which was delivered throughout different phases of the production, in addition to ten percent of Krantz's share of the profits.

Production

Funding and distribution

With the rights to Fritz the Cat, Bakshi and Krantz began searching for a distributor, though Krantz stated that "every major distributor turned it down", as studios were reluctant to distribute an independent animated film—especially one radically different from the family-friendly fare associated with Walt Disney Productions.

In the spring of 1970, Warner Bros. agreed to finance and distribute the film. The Harlem sequences were the first to be completed, and Krantz intended to release them as a 15-minute short if the film's funding was pulled; Bakshi was nevertheless determined to complete the film as a feature. Late that November, Bakshi and Krantz screened a presentation reel for the studio with its sequence, pencil tests, and storyboard footage. Reflecting on their reaction, Bakshi recalled, "You should have seen their faces in the screening room when I first screened a bit of Fritz. I'll remember their faces until I die. One of them left the room. Holy hell, you should have seen his face. 'Shut up, Frank! This is not the movie you're allowed to make!' And I said, Bullshit, I just made it."

Warner executives requested for the sexual content to be toned down and to cast big names for the voices. Bakshi refused, and Warner pulled their funding from the film, prompting Krantz to seek funds elsewhere. This led to a deal with Jerry Gross, head of Cinemation Industries, a distributor specializing in exploitation films. Although Bakshi had little time to pitch the film, Gross agreed to both fund and distribute it, seeing potential in its provocative content. Additional financing came from Saul Zaentz, who agreed to distribute the soundtrack album on his Fantasy Records label. In Australia, the film was also distributed by 20th Century-Fox.

Direction

The film was the feature debut of writer and director Ralph Bakshi (pictured in 1979).

Bakshi was initially heistant to direct Fritz the Cat, having spent years animating animal characters and aspiring instead to create films centered on humans. Despite this, he was drawn to the project because he admired Crumb's work, considered him a "total genius". During the development of the film, Bakshi said that he "started to get giddy" when he "suddenly was able to get a pig that was a cop, and this particular other pig was Jewish, and I thought, 'Oh my God—a Jewish pig?' These were major steps forward, because in the initial Heckle and Jeckle for Terrytoons, they were two black guys running around. Which was hysterically funny and, I think, great—like Uncle Remus stuff. But they didn't play down south, and they had to change two black crows to two Englishmen. And I always told him that the black crows were funnier. So it was a slow awakening." In his notes to animator Cosmo Anzilotti, Bakshi's attention to detail extended to character habits, even specifying that the crows smoked marijuana rather than tobacco. Bakshi states that "The weed had to read on screen. It's an important character detail."

The film's opening sequence sets the satirical tone of the film. The setting of the story's period is not only established by the title, but also by a voiceover from Bakshi, who portrays a character giving his account of the 1960s: "happy times, heavy times". The film's opening dialogue, featuring three construction workers on their lunch break, establishes many of the themes discussed in Fritz the Cat, including drug use, promiscuity, and the social and political climate of the era. When one worker urinates off the scaffold, the film's credits play over a shot of the liquid falling against a black screen. When the credits end, it is shown that the construction worker has urinated on a long-haired hippie with a guitar. Karl F. Cohen writes that the film "is a product of the radical politics of the period. Bakshi's depiction of Fritz's life is colorful, funny, sexist, raw, violent, and outrageous."

Of his direction of the film, Bakshi stated, "My approach to animation as a director is live action. I don't approach it in the traditional animation ways. None of our characters get up and sing, because that's not the type of picture I'm trying to do. I want people to believe my characters are real, and it's hard to believe they're real if they start walking down the street singing." Bakshi wanted the film to be the antithesis of any animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions. Accordingly, Fritz the Cat includes two satirical references to Disney. In one scene, silhouettes of Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Donald Duck are shown cheering on the United States Air Force as it drops napalm on a black neighborhood during a riot. Another scene features a reference to the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence from Dumbo. A sequence of the camera panning across a garbage heap in an abandoned lot in Harlem sets up a visual device that recurs in Hey Good Lookin'.

Writing

The original screenplay of Fritz the Cat consisted largely of dialogue and remained close to Crumb's source material, though it was ultimately set aside in favor of a more experimental storytelling approach. Bakshi said, "I don't like to jump ahead on my films. The way you feel about a film on Day One, you may not feel the same way forty weeks down the road. Characters grow, so I wanted to have the option to change things, and strengthen my characters  ... It was sort of a stream of consciousness, and a learning process for myself." Bakshi wrote the characters without feral animal behavior to lend the material greater realism.

The first half of the film's plot was adapted from a self-titled story published in a 1968 issue of R. Crumb's Head Comix, while the second part is derived from "Fritz Bugs Out", which was serialized in the February to October 1968 issues of Cavalier, and the final part of the story incorporates elements of "Fritz the No-Good", published in the September/October 1968 issue of Cavalier. The last half of the film marks a major departure from Crumb's work. Animation historian, Michael Barrier, describes this section of the film as being "much grimmer than Crumb's stories past that point, and far more violent." Bakshi stated that he deviated from the comics because he felt that the strips lacked thematic depth:

It was cute, it was sweet, but there was nowhere to put it. That's why Crumb hates the picture, because I slipped a couple of things in there that he despises, like the rabbis—the pure Jewish stuff. Fritz can't hold that kind of commentary. Winston is 'just a typical Jewish broad from Brooklyn'.  ... [The strip] was cute and well-done, but there was nothing that had that much depth.

Bakshi's unwillingness to use animal-like behavior led him to rewrite a scene in "Fritz Bugs Out", in which Duke saves Fritz's life by flying while holding Fritz; in the film, Duke grabs a railing before the car crashes into the river, a solution that Bakshi wasn't entirely satisfied with, but more grounded in realism.

In the film, there are two characters named "Winston" – one appears at the beginning and end of the film, while the other is Fritz's girlfriend, Winston Schwartz. Michael Barrier notes that Winston Schwartz (who appears prominently in "Fritz Bugs Out" and "Fritz the No-Good") never has a proper introduction in Bakshi's film, and interprets the naming of a separate character as Bakshi's attempt to reconcile this; however, the two characters look and sound nothing alike. Bakshi intended to end the film with Fritz's death, but Krantz objected to this ending, and Bakshi eventually changed it to the final ending.

Casting

The film's voice cast includes Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, Judy Engles, Mary Dean, and comic book distributor/convention organizer Phil Seuling. Hinnant, recognized as a featured performer on The Electric Company, was cast, because he "had such a naturally phony voice", according to Bakshi. Bakshi and Seuling improvised their dialogue as comically inept pig officers; Bakshi enjoyed working as a voice actor and went on to provide voice roles for his laterfilms. Bakshi re-created the voice he did in this film for a storm trooper in his 1977 animated science fiction film, Wizards.

Audio design

Some scenes used documentary recordings, made and edited by Bakshi to fit the scene, wanting Fritz the Cat to "feel real". According to Bakshi, "I made tons and tons of tapes. ... When I went to have the film mixed, the sound engineers gave me all kinds of crap about the tracks not being professionally recorded; they didn't even want to mix the noise of bottles breaking in the background, street noise, tape hiss, all kinds of shit. They said it was unprofessional, but I didn't care." Although the sound designers requested that Bakshi should re-record the dialogue in the studio, he refused to relent.

Nearly all of the film's dialogue, excluding a few main characters, was recorded entirely on the streets of New York City. For the film's opening sequence, Bakshi paid two construction workers $50 each, and drank Scotch whisky with them, recording the conversation. In the Washington Square Park sequence, only Skip Hinnant was a professional actor; Fritz's friends were voiced by young males Bakshi found in the park. One of the sequences that was not based upon Crumb's comics involved a comic chase through a synagogue full of praying rabbis. For the voices of the rabbis, Bakshi used a documentary recording of his father and uncles. This scene continued to have a personal significance for Bakshi, after his father and uncle died. Bakshi states, "Thank God I have their voices. I have my dad and family praying. It's so nice to hear now." Bakshi also went to a Harlem bar with a tape recorder and spent hours talking to black patrons, getting drunk with them as he asked them questions.

Music

Main article: Fritz the Cat (soundtrack)

The film's score was composed by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin. The soundtrack was released by Fantasy Records, featuring songs by Charles Earland, Cal Tjader, Bo Diddley, and Billie Holiday. Bakshi purchased the rights to use Holiday's performance of the song, "Yesterdays", for $35.

Animation

Fritz trying to pick up a trio of young women at Washington Square Park. The background is a watercolor painting based on a tracing from a photograph, giving the film a stylized realism virtually unprecedented in animation.

Many of the animators who worked on Fritz the Cat were professionals who Bakshi had previously worked with at Terrytoons, including Jim Tyer, John Gentilella, Nick Tafuri, Martin Taras, Larry Riley, and Cliff Augustine. According to Bakshi, it took quite a long time to assemble the right staff. Those who entered with a smirk, "wanting to be very dirty and draw filthy pictures", did not stay very long, neither did those with a low tolerance for vulgarity. One cartoonist refused to draw a black crow shooting a pig policeman. Two female animators quit; one because she could not bring herself to tell her children what she did for a living, the other because she refused to draw exposed breasts.

In order to save money by eliminating the need for model sheets, Bakshi allowed animator John Sparey to draw some of the first sequences of Fritz. Bakshi states that he knew that "Sparey would execute them beautifully." Poses from his sequences were photocopied and handed out to the rest of the crew. The film was produced almost entirely without pencil tests. According to Bakshi, "We pencil tested I'd say a thousand feet [of footage], tops. ... We do a major feature without pencil tests—that's tough. The timing falls off. I can always tell an animator to draw it better, and I know if the attitude of the characters is right, but the timing you really can't see." Bakshi had to judge the timing of the animation simply by flipping an animator's drawings in his hand, until he could see the completed animation on the screen. Veteran Warner Bros. animator, Ted Bonnicksen, was incredibly dedicated to his work on the film, to the point where he completed his animation for the synagogue sequence while suffering from leukemia, taking the scenes home at night to work on them.

In May 1971, Bakshi moved his studio to Los Angeles to hire additional animators there. Some animators, including Rod Scribner, Dick Lundy, Virgil Walter Ross, Norman McCabe, and John Sparey, welcomed Bakshi's presence, feeling that Fritz the Cat would bring diversity to the animation industry. Other animators disliked Bakshi's presence and placed an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter, stating that Bakshi's "filth" was unwelcome in California. According to Bakshi, "I didn't know who these guys were because I was from New York, so I threw the ad away." However, Bakshi found the negative reaction to the film from his peers to be disheartening.

Cinematography

Because it was cheaper for Ira Turek to trace photographs to create the backgrounds, Bakshi and Johnnie Vita walked around the streets of the Lower East Side, Washington Square Park, Chinatown, and Harlem to take moody snapshots. Turek inked the outlines of these photographs onto cels with a Rapidograph, a technical pen preferred by Crumb, giving the film's backgrounds stylized realism unprecedented in animation. After Turek completed a background drawing in ink on an animation cel, the drawing would be photocopied onto watercolor paper for Vita, then onto animation paper for use in matching the characters to the backgrounds. When Vita finished his painting, Turek's original drawing, on the cel, would be placed over the watercolor, obscuring the photocopy lines on the painting. However, not every background was taken from live-action sources. The tones of the watercolor backgrounds were influenced by the "Ash Can style" of painters, which includes George Luks and John French Sloan. The film also used bent and fisheye camera perspectives to replicate the way the film's hippies and hoodlums viewed the city.

Rating

Fritz the Cat was rated X from the Motion Picture Association of America, becoming the first American animated film to receive such a rating. However, at the time, the rating was associated with more arthouse fare, and since the recently released Melvin Van Peebles film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, released through Cinemation, had received both an X rating and considerable success, the distributor hoped that Fritz the Cat would be even more profitable. Producer Krantz stated that the film lost playdates due to the rating, and thirty American newspapers rejected display advertisements for it or refused giving it editorial publicity. The film's limited screenings led Cinemation to exploit the film's content in the film's promotion, advertising it as containing "90 minutes of violence, excitement, and SEX ... he's X-rated and animated!" According to Ralph Bakshi, "We almost didn't deliver the picture, because of the exploitation of it."

Cinemation's advertising style and the film's rating led many to believe that Fritz the Cat was a pornographic film. When it was introduced at a preview at the University of Southern California, Bakshi stated firmly, "Fritz the Cat is not pornographic." In May 1972, Variety reported that Krantz had appealed the X rating, saying "Animals having sex isn't pornography." The MPAA refused to hear the appeal. The misconceptions about the film's content were eventually cleared up when it received praise from Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and when it was accepted into the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Bakshi later stated, "Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat."

Before the film's release, American distributors attempted to cash in on the publicity garnered from the rating by rushing out dubbed versions of two other adult animated films from Japan, both featuring an X rating in their advertising material: Senya ichiya monogatari and Kureopatora, re-titled A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra: Queen of Sex. However, neither film was submitted to the MPAA. (Unlike the NC-17 rating, the MPAA never obtained a trademark on the X rating, thus any film not submitted to the MPAA for a rating can declare itself "Rated X.") The film, Down and Dirty Duck, was promoted with an X rating, but was likewise not submitted to the MPAA. The French-Belgian animated film, Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, initially was released with an X rating in a subtitled version, but a dubbed version released in 1979 received an R rating.

Reception

Initial screenings

Fritz the Cat opened on April 12, 1972, in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Despite its limited release, it went on to become a worldwide hit. Against its $700,000 budget, it grossed $25 million in the United States and over $90 million worldwide, and was at that point the most successful independent animated feature of all time. The film earned $4.7 million in theater rentals in North America.

In Michael Barrier's 1972 article on its production, Bakshi gives accounts of two screenings of the film. Of the reactions to the film by audiences at a preview screening in Los Angeles, Bakshi stated, "They forget it's animation. They treat it like a film.  ... This is the real thing, to get people to take animation seriously." Bakshi was also present at a showing of the film at the Museum of Modern Art and remembers, "Some guy asked me why I was against the revolution. The point is, animation was making people get up off their asses and get mad."

The film also sparked negative reactions because of its content. "A lot of people got freaked out", says Bakshi. "The people in charge of the power structure, the people in charge of magazines and the people going to work in the morning who loved Disney and Norman Rockwell, thought I was a pornographer, and they made things very difficult for me. The younger people, the people who could take new ideas, were the people I was addressing. I wasn't addressing the whole world. To those people who loved it, it was a huge hit, and everyone else wanted to kill me."

Critical reception

Critical reaction was mixed, but generally positive. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film is "constantly funny  ... [There's] something to offend just about everyone." New York magazine film critic Judith Crist reviewed the film as "a gloriously funny, brilliantly pointed, and superbly executed entertainment ... [whose] target is ... the muddle-headed radical chicks and slicks of the sixties", and that it "should change the face of the animated cartoon forever". Paul Sargent Clark in The Hollywood Reporter called the film "powerful and audacious", and Newsweek called it "a harmless, mindless, pro-youth saga calculated to shake up only the box office". The Wall Street Journal and Cue both gave the film mixed reviews. Thomas Albright of Rolling Stone wrote an enthusiastic preview in the December 9, 1971 issue based on seeing thirty minutes of the film, declaring that it was "sure to mark the most important breakthrough in animation since Yellow Submarine". But in a review published after its release, Albright recanted his earlier statement and wrote that the visuals were not enough to save the finished product from being a "qualified disaster", due to a "leaden plot" and a "juvenile" script that relied too heavily on tired gags and tasteless ethnic humor.

Lee Beaupre wrote for The New York Times, "In dismissing the political turbulence and personal quest of the sixties while simultaneously exploiting the sexual freedom sired by that decade, Fritz the Cat truly bites the hand that fed it." Film critic, Andrew Osmond, wrote that the epilogue hurt the film's integrity for "giving Fritz cartoon powers of survival that the film had rejected until then". Patricia Erens found scenes with Jewish stereotypes "vicious and offensive", and stated, "Only the jaundiced eye of director Ralph Bakshi, which denigrates all of the characters, the hero included, makes one reflect on the nature of the attack."

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 64%, based on 22 critic reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Fritz the Cat's gleeful embrace of bad taste can make for a queasy viewing experience, but Ralph Bakshi's idiosyncratic animation brings the satire and style of Robert Crumb's creation to vivid life."

Crumb's response

Crumb first saw the film in February 1972, during a visit to Los Angeles with fellow underground cartoonists Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, and Rick Griffin. According to Bakshi, Crumb was dissatisfied with the film. Among his criticisms, he said that he felt that Skip Hinnant was wrong for the voice of Fritz, and that Bakshi should have voiced the character instead. Crumb later said in an interview that he felt that the film was "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know. There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.  ... I didn't like that sex attitude in it very much. It's like real repressed horniness; he's kind of letting it out compulsively." Crumb also criticized the film's condemnation of the radical left, denouncing Fritz's dialogue in the final sequences of the film, which includes a quote from the Beatles song, "The End", as "red-neck and fascistic"

In "Fritz the Cat 'Superstar'," from The People's Comics, published in September 1972, Crumb kills off Fritz, where a neurotic ex-girlfriend stabs him in the back of the head with an ice pick due to Fritz' overt sexism.

Reportedly, Crumb filed a lawsuit to have his name removed from the film's credits. San Francisco copyright attorney, Albert L. Morse, said that no suit was filed, but an agreement was reached to remove Crumb's name from the credits. However, Crumb's name has remained in the final film since its original theatrical release. Due to his distaste for the film, Crumb had "Fritz the Cat—Superstar" published in People's Comics later in 1972, in which a jealous girlfriend kills Fritz with an icepick; he has refused to use the character again, and wrote the filmmakers a letter saying not to use his characters in their films. Crumb later cited the film as "one of those experiences I sort of block out. The last time I saw it was when I was making an appearance at a German art school in the mid-1980s, and I was forced to watch it with the students. It was an excruciating ordeal, a humiliating embarrassment. I recall Victor Moscoso was the only one who warned me 'if you don't stop this film from being made, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life'—and he was right."

In a 2008 interview, Bakshi referred to Crumb as a "hustler" and stated, "He goes in so many directions that he's hard to pin down. I spoke to him on the phone. We both had the same deal, five percent. They finally sent Crumb the money and not me. Crumb always gets what he wants, including that château of his in France.  ... I have no respect for Crumb. Is he a good artist? Yes, if you want to do the same thing over and over. He should have been my best friend for what I did with Fritz the Cat. I drew a good picture, and we both made out fine." Bakshi also stated that Crumb threatened to disassociate himself from any cartoonist who worked with Bakshi, which would have hurt their chances at getting work published.

Legacy

In addition to other animated films aimed at adult audiences, the film's success led to the production of a sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. Although producer Krantz and voice actor Hinnant returned for the follow-up, Bakshi did not. Instead, Nine Lives was directed by animator Robert Taylor, who co-wrote the film with Fred Halliday and Eric Monte.

Nine Lives was distributed by American International Pictures, and was considered inferior to its predecessor. Both films have been released on DVD in the United States and Canada by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the owners of the American International Pictures library via Orion Pictures) and the UK by Arrow Films. Bakshi states that he felt constricted using anthropomorphic characters in Fritz, and focused solely on non-anthropomorphic characters in Heavy Traffic and Hey Good Lookin', though he later used anthropomorphic characters in Coonskin.

The film is widely noted in its innovation for featuring content that had not been portrayed in animation before, such as sexuality and violence, and was also, as John Grant writes in his book Masters of Animation, "the breakthrough movie that opened brand new vistas to the commercial animator in the United States", presenting an "almost disturbingly accurate" portrayal "of a particular stratum of Western society during a particular era, ... as such it has dated very well." The film's subject matter and its satirical approach offered an alternative to the films previously presented by major animation studios. Michael Barrier described Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic as "not merely provocative, but highly ambitious". Barrier described the films as an effort "to push beyond what was done in the old cartoons, even while building on their strengths". It is also considered to have paved the way for future animated works for adults, including The Simpsons and South Park.

As a result of these innovations, Fritz was selected by Time Out magazine as the 42nd greatest animated film, ranked at number 51 on the Online Film Critics Society's list of the top 100 greatest animated films of all time, and was placed at number 56 on Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Cartoons. Footage from the film was edited into the music video for Guru's 2007 song "State of Clarity".

Home media

Fritz the Cat, along with The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, was released on VHS in 1988, by Warner Home Video through Orion Pictures. In 2001, MGM distributed the film with the sequel on DVD. The film again, along with its sequel, was released on Blu-ray by Scorpion Releasing and Kino Lorber on October 26, 2021, featuring a new audio commentary by comic artist Stephen R. Bissette and author G. Michael Dobbs.

See also

• List of American films of 1972
• List of cult films
• Arthouse animation

References

Video sources

• Cartoonist Kayfabe (July 5, 2020). Ralph Bakshi Shoot Interview!. YouTube. Retrieved July 2, 2025.
• Kovac, Tommy (November 4, 2022). Splat From The Past #1646- Judy Engles. YouTube. Retrieved July 2, 2025.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Works cited

• Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
• Beaupre, Lee (July 2, 1972). "Phooey on Fritz the Cat". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 28, 2020.
• Beck, Jerry (2005). The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 978-1-55652-591-9.
• Choron, Sandra; Choron, Harry; Moore, Arden (2007). Planet Cat: A Cat-Alog. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-61881-259-2.
• Cohen, Karl (1997). Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-0395-0.
• Creekmur, Corey H. (2010). "Fritz the Cat". In Booker, M. Keith (ed.). Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. ABC-CLIO. pp. 227–229. ISBN 978-0-313-35746-6.
• Crist, Judith (April 17, 1972). "A New Breed of Cat". New York Magazine. Vol. 5, no. 16. New York Media, LLC. p. 24. ISSN 0028-7369.
• Crumb, Robert (1987). The Complete Crumb Comics. Vol. 1: The Early Years of Bitter Struggle. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 978-0-93019-343-0.
• Crumb, Robert (2004). R. Crumb: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-637-9.
• Crumb, Robert; Poplaski, Peter (2005). The R. Crumb Handbook. M Q Publications. ISBN 978-1-84072-716-6.
• Duin, Steve; Richardson, Mike (1998). Comics, Between the Panels. Dark Horse Comics. ISBN 1-56971-344-8.
• Erens, Patricia (1984). The Jew in American Cinema. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-20493-3. - See profile at Google Books
• Estren, Mark J. (1974). A History of Underground Comics. Straight Arrow Books. ISBN 978-0879320751.
• Gibson, John M.; McDonnell, Chris (2008). Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. Universe. ISBN 978-0-7893-1684-4.
• Grant, John (2001). Masters of Animation. Watson–Guptill. ISBN 0-8230-3041-5.
• Harvey, R. C. (1996). The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-758-0.
• Kanfer, Stefan (2001). Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story. Da Capo. ISBN 978-0-306-80918-7.
• Lenburg, Jeff (2006). Who's Who in Animated Cartoons: An International Guide to Film and Television's Award-Winning and Legendary Animators. Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 1-55783-671-X.
• Osmond, Andrew (2010). 100 Animated Feature Films. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-84457-563-3.
• Umphlett, Wiley L. (2006). From Television to the Internet: Postmodern Visions of American Media Culture in the Twentieth Century. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-0-8386-4080-7.

External links

• Fritz the Cat at IMDb 
• Fritz the Cat at the TCM Movie Database
• Fritz the Cat at Rotten Tomatoes