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The Appropriate Tune: "Greedy", by Pure
Of all the directors that I return to time and time again on this blog the biggest surprise of the year is always Ralph Bakshi, because I don’t think he’s a good filmmaker. While his devotion to animation certainly helps him stand out in regards to the animation-unfriendly U.S. film industry (unless your name is Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks), across the several films of his that we’ve covered on this blog and a couple I watched outside of it I can’t think of any that I actually enjoyed. In fact in the case of the last film covered, his so-called landmark film Heavy Traffic, I actively disliked it by the end. As a director of animation he does good work and is super influential, sure, but as a director of film, as a crafter of engaging stories, I’m not impressed. Is it me? Is there something that everyone else sees that I don’t, so I keep throwing him in here in the hopes that one day something will finally click? Or am I just afraid of change and prefer to cling onto something familiar, no matter what it is? Probably the latter.
Released by Paramount in 1992, Cool World was directed by Ralph Bakshi and written by Michael Grais and Mark Victor, the writers behind Poltergeist. In 1945 Las Vegas newly returned soldier Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) is taking his mom on a leisurely motorcycle ride (as you do) when he is plowed into by a drunk driver. His mom dies, while Frank ends up being transported to Cool World, a dimension populated by living, breathing cartoons known as Doodles. Having nothing left for him back in regular reality Frank decides to settle down in Cool World and become an officer of the law, dedicating his life to preventing ‘Noids’, humans who have been transported to Cool World through dreams or whatever (it’s never really explained) from fraternizing with Doodles. Some Doodles are quite keen on the idea of fraternizing with Noids, particularly the seductive scofflaw Holli Would (Kim Basinger), as an especially biblical fraternization guarantees one a ticket to the human world and all the delights therein (why it does is never really explained). For years Holli has been working marks, trying to score a ticket on the midnight meat train to Humanland, and now in 1992 she’s finally struck gold: Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a former prisoner who has used what he thought were dreams of Holli and company to write a famous comic book also known as Cool World. Will Frank manage to keep Holli from humping her way from an ink sack to a meatsack? Also why is a movie that literally hinges on sex rated PG-13? All these questions and many many more if for some reason you decide to watch this movie.
Alright, let’s start with what I liked about this movie. I love the look of Cool World itself, particularly the matte painting backgrounds; The entire city has this rotting, nightmarish quality to it that Tim Burton wishes he could replicate, like the classic noir setting brought to its logical conclusion. I like how Doodle architecture is interpreted in reality, like making the lamp posts 2D cardboard stand ins. I also like that we got some actual voice actors in here, Maurice Lamarche, Charlie Adler, Candi Milo. That’s about it.
Now for what I didn’t like about it...hoo boy. Let’s start with our lead here, Brad Pitt. Now far be it from me to say that Brad Pitt is a bad actor, as he’s had a long enough and storied enough career to prove otherwise, but I will say that this role clearly doesn’t suit him. Not only is he too boyishly handsome in ‘92 to play a grizzled cop and war veteran, but his performance is also noticeably stiff. Which is understandable when he’s interacting with the cartoons, but even when he’s around other human beings he seems really awkward. Not in a ‘this at least 60+ year old man with lingering trauma doesn’t know how to be around people’ way which would fit in with the themes of the film either, more like ‘first year drama student attempting improv’. Even his suit doesn’t seem to fit him right in some scenes, like it’s a size too big for him. I get why they wanted him, if you’re going to be looking at one human face for large chunks of the movie then get one that looks like Brad Pitt, but Bogart as Philip Marlowe this is not.
Then we’ve got our other two major Noids, Kim Basinger as Holli Would and Gabriel Byrne as Jack Deebs. I like Holli enough in the first half, clearly drawn in the femme fatale mould but drawn well, but once she goes human the deviousness becomes more akin to childishness. Understandable in some ways as she’s taking in this new perception of life but we barely see her do anything as a human so we never have a chance to really empathize with her, plus the climax screws over her character something fierce. Jack Deebs you would think would carry about as much weight as a character as Brendan Fraser’s character did in Monkeybone, and he really doesn’t until the moment the movie directly tells us he does, so he’s just kind of there until then.
Of course a poor performance by an actor often comes down to poor direction, and we’ve already covered that point earlier. I’ve heard that this film underwent some executive meddling in order to drop it from a R to a PG-13 rating, likely Paramount’s attempt at grabbing the audience forged by Who Framed Roger Rabbit back in ‘88, but this movie is over two hours long and it feels like it’s missing an extra hour. It’s never explained what the connection is between Cool World and our world, if it’s some kind of limbo area like Monkeybone, and why they would need to build a portal to our world if they’re able to get to Cool World through dreams, or whatever that throwaway line Frank says. It’s also never explained why a Doodle having sex with a human turns them human or how anyone figured that out, beyond that the fact that they needed a convenient excuse to get their own versions of Jessica Rabbit in there, Holli Would and Frank’s love interest Lonette. Over two hours long, and yet by the time we reach the climax it feels like the metaphorical hands were thrown up and they just stumbled into an ending. To call it fulfilling would be like calling a multivitamin and a glass of water a meal.
That Cool World is meant to be Paramount’s answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit should go without saying, even though I’ve said as much a couple times. Both noir-inspired adventure films where a human detective with an accent has to interact with living cartoons. Which leads us to the major question of the day: How does the animation of Cool World look compared to that of Roger Rabbit? The answer: About 20 million dollars cheaper. That’s not to say there isn’t good work there obviously; The climax gets pretty wild and Holli and Lonette’s movements are fluid, but not everyone in Cool World can be so lucky. A lot of Doodles that barely look barely a step above doodles if you catch my drift, and move about as well too. Not too bad if they were kept strictly to background shots, but the first half of Cool World is saturated with this constant barrage of noise and motion that it doesn’t allow you to overlook. They’ll even cut away from the story so that they can do these little skits or whatever and it’s like yes, I know that cartoons are wacky and chaotic, you’ve reminded me every two seconds for the past 45 minutes, you got anything else to say? Compare to Roger Rabbit, where you get that craziness when Eddie Valiant visits Toontown and the rest of the movie is Toons interacting with real life people. It works because that visit had been built up across the course of the movie, the still chugs along, and Eddie acts as the audience surrogate dealing with this craziness. Cool World by contrast is obnoxious and immediate, and between 70 year old plank of wood Frank and glorified extra Jack we don’t ever have a proper everyman to help process this world for us.
No, Cool World doesn’t get the recommendation, unless you just finished Monkeybone and were jonesin’ for more flop movies that deal heavily in animation. I must admit though that my overall feelings towards the film lean towards bemusement than outright dislike as has been the case in the past. There’s the core of a good idea there, a man who refuses to confront his feelings of guilt and loss retreats into a fantasy world that resembles the familiar chaos of war and the pop culture of his time who is then forced to return to the real world by circumstance, or an artist creates something so popular that it overshadows them and is then pushed into action against their creation in a literal sense (a bit more like Monkeybone I guess), but it’s pushing so much stuff at you it never gets anything done. If I had to rewatch a Bakshi movie out of the ones we’ve covered thus far, it’d probably be Cool World. Or I’d just play Toonstruck again and save myself the time.
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