Subject: REVIEW: COOL WORLD

From: [email-masked] (Narciso Jaramillo)
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1992 19:49:57 GMT

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			      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
[email-masked]