COOL WORLD
A film review by Lon Ponschock
Copyright 1992 Lon Ponschock
So I ask my companion why she fell asleep during COOL WORLD and she says, "Well, when the animator and the cartoon character of Holli Would first meet I was wondering when she was going to say 'Draw me a vagina.'" Yeah, I guess we all were.
Ralph Bakshi is known for outrageous animation, and COOL WORLD with its PG-13 rating goes some way in extending the boundaries of what can be done with it.
Animated characters such as Holli Would and Jessica Rabbit are a part of a collective fantasy based on a variety of sources. In the original novel by Gary K. Wolf, Jessica has just recently come up from pornographic comics: the crudely drawn kind such as the Naughty Nurse we find Lucas Haas reading under the sheets in RAMBLING ROSE.
(Fans of this style should pick up on the original WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT? by Gary K. Wolf. The sense of the novel is completely different from the film in that the characters from toontown are real: The cartoon panels that you see in the newspaper are merely photographs or 'shoots' of real life in toontown. And when a talking bubble above their heads completes a phrase, it falls to earth in powder form so that people think all toons have dandruff. There's more, but go read the book.)
The Japanese style of anime illustration is now readily available at your video store and is hugely popular here on the Usenet forum. COOL WORLD shows that American animators can explore just as much sexuality as their anime counterparts, but not much more either.
COOL WORLD, unlike Toon Town, is a separate dimension. It is at once an invention of an illustrator who has recently been released from prison for killing his wife and an independent reality.
The plot element of Jack Deebs killing his wife is curiously missing from any discussion of COOL WORLD that I have seen. Has the illustrator merely been the hand in detailing the characters of COOL WORLD or has he actually created the reality of it?
COOL WORLD was up and running fifty years ago. But the apparent age of Gabriel Byrne who plays Jack Deebs, the illustrator is early 30's.
Brad Pitt, another human, had been transferred through the use of an invention by one Dr. Whiskers at a moment of crisis in his life in 1945. He has been living in COOL WORLD ever since World War II. The COOL WORLD life forms are called doodles. Brad's character, Frank, has had a doodle girlfriend (apparently) for the last fifty years. But one of the rules of Cool World is that humanoids and doodles don't have sex. They can touch, feel and eat though. There are only two female characters of humanoid type. Were they drawn or did they have parents? What is their history?
Animation allows the director to give full rein to his imagination and to have full control over the end result. In COOL WORLD there is never an idle moment. Cartoon cliches cavort all over the screen for the full 1 hour 45 mins. of the production. There is a lot in COOL WORLD.
The kids that were in the matinee performance which we attended had a great time with the "primitives" hitting each other over the head with mallets ala the "primitive" style cartoons within cartoons: Itchy and Scratchy on THE SIMPSONS. What the kids are supposed to make of the more mature elements of the show I cannot answer. I don't even know what they "see" when humans are falling into the holes of a cartoon dimension.
My companion tells me the story of how Bob Hoskins, while he was making ROGER RABBIT, found his son scowling at him when he was done at the studio for the day. Hoskins didn't know why the child was upset with him. Upon asking his son what the matter was, the child said, "You've been working with cartoons, and you never brought any of them home with you."
Parents with younger children should be cautioned of the adult themes contained in the film.
The best moment in the film for me was near the end during the climax of the picture in which Cool World and the real world intersect in Las Vegas (well, maybe it probably isn't that much of a stretch). Momentarily the humans at the various gaming tables get cartoon identities. This worked so well for me that after we left the theatre, I saw people as what they might look like as cartoons for a time. The picture is worth seeing for this sequence alone.
My conclusion? In the area of animated sensuality *any* progress is *some* progress. So COOL WORLD did not bore me. How could it? Bakshi learned his lesson after WIZARDS: don't let the audience get bored at a cartoon show no matter what! I am contributing to this discussion because I think that there is more in COOL WORLD, more questions to ask than I have seen thus far on the Net or elsewhere.
Maybe in video and with multiple viewings COOL WORLD will gain a cult following similar to DETOUR which is currently in remake. And while we're at it, how about giving Tim Burton lots of money to do a new version of THE FIVE THOUSAND FINGERS OF DR. T?
lon
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews