It isn’t usually hard to find a successful thing or two about a movie I generally think is bad. But for Cool World (1992), it’s really impossible. Cartoonist Ralph Bakshi’s return to film directing after a nearly decade-long break is so thoroughly inept that even the opening credits feel wrong. Backed by music that sounds like the first option on a “Free Stock House Beats” list and long enough to prompt worries of them actually being misplaced closing credits, they have the grace of slide show foregoing automatic transitions to help preoccupy someone’s bored pointer finger, dangling impatiently over a right-arrow key.
Anyone who’s decided they’d like to check out Cool World despite its extremely bad reputation knows that, like the genuinely magical-feeling Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), this is a movie where cartoons and flesh-and-blood people bump elbows often and freely. Because the thought of most of Cool World’s victims before they hit play was probably, how bad can a movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Brad Pitt in it be? (I assume this because that’s what I was thinking ahead of time and I am hard-pressed to believe I’m the only one.) The answer is neither “kind of,” nor “pretty,” but “very.”
In Cool World, there exist two universes: the one in which we live, and then a cartoon one. The movie gets its name from the latter. This toon alternative isn’t really explained, though, and the film’s screenwriters, Michael Grais and Mark Victor, don’t care to cohesively build it. It’s just there. The place we see is a collection of ugly interiors populated by big-mouthed and goggle-eyed cartoon characters with no real trademarks besides a “funny” voice and look.
At the beginning of the movie, Pitt, playing a newly home World War II veteran named Frank, gets in a head-on motorcycle crash and is randomly zapped into Cool World by a globe-headed scientist with a walrus mustache doing border-breaking experiments. Frank doesn’t immediately try leaving because he doesn’t have much going on back at home: his mother, apparently his only living family member, died in the accident. So he reinvents himself as a detective, staying put in Cool World for decades and not aging even though he remains fleshly.
Detectives in Cool World are, I guess, more than anything concerned with preventing this animated sphere from at all intersecting with the real world. Would you believe that this movie comes to mostly be about Frank ensuring a Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell in Cool World named Holli Would (Kim Basinger, cooing and pouting like a sentient cheesecake photo until no sexiness can remain) determined to sleep with a live-action guy so she becomes “real” (i.e., live-action Kim Basinger) doesn’t do that? She has a good victim in Jack (Gabriel Byrne), a cartoonist said to have drawn her and winds up, like Frank, in this alternate universe by mistake.
This coupling is bad news. Plus, too much crossing over between the two worlds will ostensibly cause blips in both that time will only compound. Though the movie doesn’t dwell much on the greater enormity of those blips, nor does it derive any suspense from them. So all you may remember about Cool World later on, if you remember it, is that it’s about Pitt trying to stop a cartoon woman from having sex with a real man. Which isn’t interesting enough to sustain a movie 102 minutes too long.
If the animation and world-building were good enough, Cool World could potentially be a movie getting by purely as experientially despite not offering much else. But neither registers anywhere close to adequate. We have no sense of the size of this dreamworld, the factions within it, or its broader traits. And the animation itself has a sloppiness, too, and unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which had an uncanny way of making it look like Jessica Rabbit really was provocatively brushing her manicured fingers against Bob Hoskins’ pugnacious chest, the effects look cheap in Cool World. When an animated love interest of Frank’s puts her hand on his shoulder to comfort him in one scene, you notice her fingers not quite lining up right with his blade. It’s as if the animators were trying in real time to line it up and didn’t mind if the final take captured that struggle. And when the real actors are stumbling around in Cool World, you can practically see the green screen. Bakshi can’t get us to fall for the illusion.
Cool World’s shoddiness and lack of focus are generally blamed now on studio interference and overall production disorder. Grais and Victor had been hired in secret by a Paramount executive to overhaul Bakshi’s original — and supposedly more daring — screenplay. Animators weren’t handed anything like a script and were allegedly instructed by Bakshi to just keep things as funny as they could. That explains why all the jokes, conflating outward goofiness with real humor, all land like puzzling non-sequiturs.
I’m curious to see how Bakshi’s movie might have played out sans tampering. That curiosity shouldn’t suggest a confidence it’d be much of an improvement, though. True, I’m not well-versed in the Bakshi megaverse: I haven’t seen his other movies except for Fritz the Cat (1972). But since that’s supposedly his masterpiece, and suffers from basically all the same problems Cool World does — landing-with-a-thud humor, no clear direction, sleaze that scans more creepily lecherous than humorously provocative — it’s hard to hold out hope. Fritz the Cat’s animation is at least a little better; you can somewhat grasp the world Bakshi is attempting to create. With Cool World, you grasp stale air.
Peterson Reviews 