COOL WORLD
A film review by Narciso Jaramillo
Copyright 1992 Narciso Jaramillo
Ralph Bakshi (FRITZ THE CAT, BASKETBALL JONES, LORD OF THE RINGS) is generally known for two things: raw humor, and running out of money. This time he's hooked up with Frank Mancuso (FRIDAY THE 13TH), so the budget problems aren't there, but the humor is as raw as ever. The result is a guilty pleasure for animation fans, a flawed, possibly offensive, but nevertheless amusing movie.
Holli Would (voice by Kim Basinger) is a shapely, seductive cartoon character (a "Doodle"). Although Doodles are sentient beings, they have no sense of touch--they can't physically feel anything. So Holli wants to become a real human (a "Noid"), and cross over from the world of the Doodles, the Cool World, into the real world. To this end she seduces comic-book artist Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), who has some sort of subconscious link to the Cool World and has drawn a successful series of comic books based on his visions. Unfortunately, her "reification," as it were, has consequences for The Universe As We Know It, and detective Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) has to clean up.
The obvious genre comparison to make would be to WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, the huge Disney extravaganza that also combined live action with exquisitely rendered animations. COOL WORLD would certainly suffer by the comparison in many ways. Live action and animation are not combined as often, the animations are not nearly as impressive, the acting is weak, and the plot and continuity have gaping holes.
Yet for all this, the vision of Doodle reality in COOL WORLD makes more sense than the sanitized Toontown of ROGER RABBIT. The Cool World is cartoon humor taken to a logical extreme: if cartoon characters can't really be killed or hurt, only embarrassed, and the entire purpose for their existence is to provide entertainment through physical humor, then why wouldn't they fill their entire life with completely random, utterly meaningless acts of violence? And so practically every scene is filled with distracting Doodles beating on each other in a myriad ways. Even Harris, a Noid, has lived in the Cool World so long that he shoves everyone around, Doodles and Noids alike. He doesn't interact like a normal human being anymore.
The quality of the animation ranges from passable to excellent, with much rotoscopish attention paid to Holli's figure, as expected. Both the drawn backgrounds and live-action sets in the Cool World are beautifully dark and twisted.
While there were enough good jokes (and some really funny gags) to keep me amused, the film's weakest point is the sheer immaturity of most of its humor--the humor of gonads and anvils. But for all its sexism, scatology, and gratuitous violence, we understand at the end that Bakshi knows exactly what he's doing--glorifying an animator's wet dream--and that he just doesn't care. COOL WORLD is not about comic-book characters, but about the artists who draw them and the people who read them. It is a glimpse into what they really fantasize about--and in the end, the artist gets exactly what he wants.
Unfortunately, this self-indulgence, amusing as it may be for us comic fans, is precisely the film's downfall. Overall, I give the film a 4/10 for non-animation fans, and a 6/10 for animation fans. For the latter, I suggest waiting for it on video, so you can put it on pause or slo-mo and look at all the little foreground sight gags.
-- Narciso Jaramillo nj@cs.Berkeley.EDU
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