‘Cool World’ Is the Slimy, Adult Answer to ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ Best Watched After Midnight
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
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Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Brad Pitt Wants to Fuck a Cartoon in “Cool World”
If Robert Zemeckis’ “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” is one of the wonders of the cinematic world, then Ralph Bakshi’s “Cool World” is its under-trafficked, overly adult gift shop. The 1992 flop is worth walking through at least once — though I wouldn’t pick up anything from its metaphorical floor.
Embraced by lovers of animated baddies and so-wrong-it’s-right gems everywhere, this dark (and, like, sticky?) medium-blending fantasy film was intended to be Bakshi’s big comeback after a ten-year movie hiatus, arriving aboard a hype train from Warner Bros. and Disney’s half-animated film noir spoof from 1988.
Working with the biggest budget of that decade, “Roger Rabbit” — starring Bob Hoskins opposite a fast-talking animated bunny, voiced by Charles Fleischer — won three Oscars and pulled the highest box office of its year. The cartoon crossover event allowed Looney Toons’ Bugs and Daffy to miraculously share a screen with Disney’s Mickey and Donald to uproarious success. Plus, it introduced bonafide sex symbol Jessica Rabbit to the drooling masses via a sincere story with some real technical chops.
So, naturally, for its slimy, ill-advised knockoff, Paramount risked no original IP and left its talented director to languish in an inky puddle of studio interference and missed opportunities.
Bakshi, a visionary animator and director, was best known then for the masterful “American Pop” (1981), and the stunning hand-drawn “Lord of the Rings” (1978). A 75-foot billboard cutout of “Cool World” breakout star Holli Would — a gogo dancing villainess, voiced by a bimbo-fied Kim Basinger — heralded Bakshi’s return, and was erected above the “H” in the Hollywood sign that summer in Los Angeles. Really.
His last film in the end, Bakshi’s inverted, perverted take on Toontown went through countless rewrites and far too tumultuous of a production process to produce anything cohesive. “Poltergeist” co-writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor ultimately get the writing credit on an icky, misguided story you can safely pick for parts but exemplifies the sometimes mesmerizing lows that can come from artistic disasters.
Fresh off his breakout in “Thelma & Louise,” Brad Pitt stars as a World War II veteran and victim of a hit-and-run inexplicably sucked into an animated world. He quickly learns that in Cool World, humans or “Noids” (gag) are prohibited from fornicating with the cartoon beings known as Doodles — or something bad that never really gets explained might happen. Enter Holli, who really wants to fuck a human dude because that just might make her human? Maybe? Enter Gabriel Byrne, looking horny and confused as ever, as Jack Deebs: the tortured comic book artist who created the in-universe “Cool World,” and might just give Holli what she wants. Therein lies the rub… or not. —AF
The Aftermath: Yep, Brad Pitt Fucked That Cartoon in “Cool World”
“Alright, Brad, all you have to do is stand there and hold your arm at a 120 degree angle as if there’s a watermelon floating next to your ear that you’re trying to squeeze with your elbow. We’ll go in afterwards and add the three sickly women giving handjobs to spherical purple demons while dodging urine streams from anthropomorphic sewer rats.” —Ralph Bakshi every day on set, I imagine.
This was the first time I’ve ever walked away from a film with the unshakeable feeling that I caught an STD from watching it. I could tell that the skeleton of a conventional Hollywood movie was lurking somewhere underneath “Cool World,” but all I could see was the blubbery mass of what can only be described as animated chlamydia that was draped over it. Not sure if this is a testament to the film or an indictment of my personal character, but I enjoyed every second of it.
I do, however, have some concerns about the legal system and allocation of police resources in Cool World. It appears that Brad Pitt has a taxpayer-funded job as… The Anti-Fucking Police? His only responsibility for the past 47 years has been preventing Noids from having sex with Toons, despite the fact that up until very recently he was the only Noid? In a world that’s literally riddled with trash fires and rabid dogs and peeping toms, I think it’s an inexcusable mistake to have him devote his entire law enforcement career to policing his own celibacy. Really makes you wonder how many other tragedies in this film could have been prevented by a competent city government.
To me, this movie embodies the “halfway decent idea executed unimaginably poorly” subgenre that I love so dearly. It’s easy to imagine a “Fritz the Cat”-loving cinephile being elated by the news that Ralph Bakshi was going to apply his brand of animated sleaze to a live-action canvas after the success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” And the idea of an adult-oriented riff on Zemeckis’ formula doesn’t sound theoretically terrible either. Watching it fail to live up to that promise is utterly fascinating. For all the talk of sex, “Cool World” is profoundly — almost disgustingly — unsexy. I think it goes off the rails in part because there’s some seriously repressed puritanism lurking beneath the surface. The film truly seems to believe that sex isn’t a positive experience that people are meant to share — it’s something that you stand on a cartoon dog’s shoulders to watch other people do through the window while you jerk off. Bakshi keeps reminding us that we should feel guilty about the filth we’re watching, and eventually I started to believe him. —CZ
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can rent “Cool World” on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, and Google Play.
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