“Fritz the Cat” turns 50

I don’t remember when and where I first saw “Fritz the Cat”; It was long ago. But I still remember how impressed I was with this cartoon – it was so unlike any cartoon I’d ever seen before. A brutal ode to the sixties, interspersed with sex & drugs & rock’n’roll of course, but also with violence and blood. In 1972, 50 years ago, the cheeky cat first appeared on the big screen. Reason enough for a review – with some spoilers!

Fritz the Cat is a lot older than the movie of the same name. Illustrator Robert Crumb created the character in 1959, when he was only 16, in a homemade comic called “Cat Life”. Crumb loved cats and he started drawing cat stories to entertain his younger sister Sandy. The model was Fred, the family cat. Fritz initially appeared as a real cat, walking on all fours and doing cat things. However, in the 1960 comic strip “Robin Hood,” Crumb put the cat on its hind legs, dressed it, and let it speak. In the early 1960s, Fritz appeared in the Animal Town private comics that Crumb drew alone or with his older brother Charles.

It was not until 1965 that a wider audience first came into contact with the hangover: Fritz appeared in the magazine “Help!” by Harvey Kurtzman. After Crumb became better known and moved to San Francisco, more comics appeared in 1968 and 1972 – where the cat proved to be quite versatile and could appear in a variety of roles such as pop star or spy. Fritz became Crumb’s best-known character, probably even before Mr. Natural, and an icon of American underground comics.

And yet Crumb put an early and violent end to his famous hangover—he had Fritz, now a film producer, murdered in 1972 by a frustrated starlet. The reason for the premature end of the Fritz series was that Crumb was not at all satisfied with the film adaptation that came out that same year.

Especially in the early comics, Fritz is a hedonistic, quick-witted and self-centered busybody who is confident and successful with women. This is in stark contrast to Crumb’s personality – especially when he was young, the artist was shy; he had few friends and “no sex life,” according to Marty Pahls, a childhood friend of Crumb’s and later the husband of Crumb’s sister Sandy. Pahls believed that Fritz was largely fulfilling Crumb’s wish; the character allowed Crumb to “go on wild adventures and have a variety of sexual experiences that he himself thought he couldn’t have.”

As Crumb’s life changed – he moved to Cleveland in 1964, made new friends and married Dana Morgan, his first wife – his character also changed. The “compensation factor” has faded into the background and Fritz has lost his “elan”. Crumb himself categorically dismisses any possible references between Fritz and himself, simply saying, “I just loved drawing him… It was fun drawing him.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Robert Crumb isn’t an artist for every taste. Some find his art abhorrent, obscene, sexist and racist. The bad boy of the American underground comics scene liked to draw busty women with stocky legs, and as he revealed to The Guardian over three years ago, he was obsessed with sexual desire and sex fantasies. If he hadn’t been able to express this inner turmoil in his comics, Crumb said, he might have ended up in jail or a psychiatric ward. He is no longer a slave to his libido. And he doesn’t draw women anymore.

Born on August 30, 1943 in Philadelphia, Crumb came from a difficult family background – the dysfunction of his childhood home can be guessed by watching the documentary “Crumb” (1994). His older brother Charles, who had drawn comics with him as a teenager, became mentally ill as an adult and committed suicide in 1993. It is possible that only his artistic work and the success that accompanied it saved Crumb from a similar fate.

In any case, Crumb became the foremost representative of the American comedic counterculture, alongside perhaps Gilbert Shelton. In San Francisco, his work changed; now, under the influence of LSD, he designed new characters such as Mr. Natural, who were no longer anthropomorphic animals like Fritz the Cat. The famous cat was now more and more in the background.

In San Francisco, Crumb also designed the record cover for the Janis Joplin album “Cheap Thrills”, which brought him extra fame. The clumsy, nerdy Crumb, who himself preferred to listen to music from the swing era – like Earl Hines & His Orchestra – didn’t really fit the flower-power hippies of Haight-Ashbury. It is probably no coincidence that in the mid-1990s Crumb moved with his second wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky, to a remote village in the south of France, where he still lives today.

The 1972 film Fritz the Cat catapulted Crumb’s cheeky hangover from the basement of the underground comics community into the mainstream. Although it was the first animated film to receive an X – for adults only – in the United States, “Fritz the Cat” became a huge commercial success. The highest-grossing independent animated film of all time grossed over $100 million at the box office.

The 75-minute strip is heavily based on Crumb’s “Fritz Bugs Out” comic, in which Fritz is a school dropout and wants to “explore the world”. The setting is mostly New York in the mid-1960s; the themes are student life, free love, drug use, police brutality, racial unrest and political extremism.

Fritz, an arrogant white college student, uses the student counterculture primarily to fuck women—the legendary bathtub sex orgy—but after narrowly escaping two cops (in the form of bumbling pigs), he heads to Harlem to join to join the blacks (they are depicted as crows) to discuss the racial issue. Which doesn’t end well.

The film project was a gamble. Director Ralph Bakshi had no previous experience making animated films, and the $850,000 budget was anything but generous. Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz arranged the production so that the part of the film, set in the New York borough of Harlem, could have been released as a 15-minute short film if the money ran out.

Despite its success, Crumb was anything but happy with the film and, as previously mentioned, had his character Fritz die shortly after the film’s opening. Discord already existed at the beginning of the film project. Bakshi recalls Crumb protesting in the New York studio at the time that Fritz was part of his past: “It’s my oldest thing, I do things differently now,” he said.

Bakshi, as he says, always replied the same: “But that’s your medium. It’s as new to our medium as the day you first did it, Robert!” Crumb still claims he never gave his consent – it was his then wife who agreed to the film project during his absence.

In an interview later, Crumb barely left a hair on the film. He says the film “really reflects Ralph Bakshi’s confusion, you know. There’s something very repressive about it. In a way, it’s even more twisted than my stuff. It’s really twisted, in a weird, unfunny way… I didn’t really like that sexual attitude in it. It’s like real suppressed horniness, he compulsively lets them out.”

Crumb also criticized the film’s condemnation of the radical left. He even called Fritz’s monologue towards the end of the film, which contains an almost verbatim quote from the Beatles song “The End” (“The love you take / Is equal to the love you make”), “fascist” and explained. ex: “They put words in his mouth that I would never have let him say.”

Today, 50 years after the film’s inception, these battles should be a thing of the past for most viewers. The film was so successful that it made Crumb even more famous and boosted Bakshi’s career. The director stayed true to the adult animation genre and received critical acclaim for his second film, Heavy Traffic (1973). A financial success was his film adaptation of “Lord of the Rings” (1978), in which some scenes were first shot with real actors and then traced using the rotoscopy process.

Bakshi’s first film “Fritz the Cat” – he called it a “documentary film of the 1960s” – is now considered a cult film, which includes adult animated series such as “The Simpsons”, “South Park”, “Beavis and Butt -Head” or “Family Guy” paved the way. Of course, he also paved the way for a sequel – “The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat” (1974) – which was produced without the participation of Bakshi or Crumb and can in no way hold a candle to its predecessor.