Cool World (1992) 1/2 * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Wretched, supposedly fanciful combination of animation and live action that puts a fat nail in Ralph Bakshi's career coffin.
COOL WORLD was stalled and then re-started when ROGER RABBIT took theaters by storm. Based on what's on screen, it should have remained stalled. It's a haphazardly-assembled movie that nobody thought very much about, except in how it would look. And even there they didn't do much thinking.
Brad Pitt (called Frank Harris) opens the movie, shortly after "the war". After coming home, he rides on a motorcycle with his mother, gets into an accident, and somehow manages to breach a path into a parallel dimension called, none too surprisingly, Cool World. The inhabitants are cartoons, called Doodles -- although based on the mouth/dialog mismatch, I suspect they were originally called Toons before the ADR people decided to avoid trouble.
Flash-forward. Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) is a comic-book creator who's about to get out of prison. We learn though various incompetently-placed bits and pieces of exposition that he landed there when he murdered the guy who was duking his wife, although like a lot of things in this movie, that kind of behavior is not shown to really be a part of his personality. It's just sort of dropped in. But Deebs has bigger problems: he keep sliding back and forth between reality and the world of his comics, which is, of course, Cool World. And then one day he lands there for keeps, and is instantly hit upon by sexbomb Doodle Holli Would ("realized" by Kim Basinger, who has gone on to prove that she is, in fact, a very capable actress).
COOL WORLD tries to set up the "rules" about its universe and falls flat on its face. For instance, Doodles and humans are never supposed to have sex, for reasons that are never made clear. Worse, the consequences of such intercourse are depicted later in the movie, but they're so confusing and nonsensical that we don't even care.
The movie's look is frantic and inconsistent. Bakshi's animation has never been long on clarity, and COOL WORLD looks like a hashish-crazed version of those Jack Davis cartoons in MAD, where grotty-looking maniacs all chase each other around the room. The art direction, staging, 'tweening, and everything else are pitched so hard and so far over the top that it's impossible to FOCUS on anything. There is less imagination at work here than anthologizing. Everything looks bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, and the "ironic" contrasts (the little fluffy bunnies, etc.) are just witless.
The live-action backdrops also don't look credible. Bakshi, in an interview, lovingly described how the sets were created by simply projecting cels of animation onto them and then having the builders paint using the projections as guidelines. The results aren't like a cartoon come to life; they look like a very bad set for a school play. One of the walls vibrates disturbingly when Pitt throws Byrne against it.
The story shows the signs of a script, and a movie, that were hacked to shreds and then pieced back together on the editing table. An interesting way to find out about tampering is to read the comic-book tie-ins or novelizations of movies: you frequently see a lot of material that existed in the shooting script, provided to the artists or writers of the tie-ins, but never made it to the screen. COOL WORLD's tie-ins not only have a totally different ending, but show the fingerprints of meddling all the way through. At no point, I guess, did anyone take a look at his story and decide it simply wasn't enough -- that there needed to be a clear line of logic from beginning to end, that the characters had to be motivated by other things than passing whims, and that we get more out of the movie than a juicy headache.
Ralph Bakshi seems to have been an artifact of a very particular time. His earlier movies, like HEAVY TRAFFIC and STREET FIGHT, were inconsistent, but also funny and nasty in hallucinatory ways. Then he tried to create more upscale work, like the spastic WIZARDS and the over-touted LORD OF THE RINGS productions. Now this. He hasn't done anything since, has he?
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