COOL WORLD

Date of publication: 07/13/1992

By Roger Ebert

The DJ who was hosting the radio station's free preview of "Cool World" leaped onto the stage and promised the audience: "If you liked `Roger Rabbit,' you'll love `Cool World'!" He was wrong, but you can't blame him - he hadn't seen the movie. I have, and I will now promise you that if you liked "Roger Rabbit," quit while you're ahead.

"Cool World" is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line. Like "Roger Rabbit," it assumes that humans and cartoon characters can exist within the same reality, and it gives us human beings who find themselves in the "cool world" in another dimension beyond the animator's pen.

There is nothing wrong with this concept. There is everything wrong with the execution. Let's start with the animation itself, which seems to have been created by Ralph Bakshi with an unrealistic idea of how quickly we can comprehend visual information. A great deal of this film is so complex, chaotic, quick-cut and fast-moving that it is impossible to sit in the audience and figure out what is being depicted. The cartoon characters are so plastic that they are able to distort their shapes quickly and extremely, which occasionally leads to a good effect but often prevents us from seeing, or registering, who they are or what they are doing.

Then there is the story, beginning with a prologue in postwar Las Vegas that exists only to catapult one of the characters (played by Brad Pitt) into the "Cool World." He works as a cop there, and eventually is joined by another human, a cartoonist, Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), who has followed one of his creations, the seductive Holli Would (first a cartoon and later a human played by Kim Basinger).

The central appeal of the movie is apparently meant to be the possibility of sex between Holli Would and a human. But the climactic scene - with Holli warming up in the preliminaries - is senselessly interrupted by cross-cutting to another scene of no apparent relevance, and indeed dramatic tension in the film is constantly under mined by Bakshi's jittery cutaways.

The film misses one opportunity after another. Look, for example, at the scene where Holli has taken human form and goes to a nightclub with Deebs. The way this scene is handled is almost a textbook example of incompetent writing, directing, filmmaking, acting - and, most importantly, storytelling. A million funny or interesting things could have happened in that nightclub. None of them does. The scene is agonizing.

Look, too, at sequences in Vegas casinos, where ordinary gamblers turn into cartoons and back again. Could this be funny? Bizarre? Intriguing? Surprising? Maybe in another movie. The audience sat in soporific silence.

One of the obvious weaknesses of "Cool World" is the way it integrates animation and live action. "Roger Rabbit" was made with such precision and attention to subtle detail that it really did look as if people and "Toons" were inhabiting the same space. In "Cool World," a human character will throw an arm around the shoulders of a cartoon, and the mismatch will be so distracting it's the only thing we can look at on the screen.

Bakshi's desperation is revealed in several brief sequences in which bizarre Cool World characters hurtle about the screen, screaming and gnashing, for no reason except to kill time or cover an awkward transition. What's odd is that an animated film would be so badly planned. Animation requires so much work at the storyboard level that these films are usually well-plotted, if nothing else. "Cool World" is a surprisingly incompetent film.

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Cool World

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 10, 1992

The major issue to be resolved in "Cool World," Ralph Bakshi's new venture into the "Roger Rabbit"-style marriage of animation and live action, is whether Kim Basinger is more obnoxious as a cartoon or as a real person. Basinger plays Holli Would, a curvacious pen-and-ink nymphet who lives in a cartoon universe called "Cool World." This animated parallel dimension was created, Holli included, by Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), an underground cartoonist who, without warning, is suddenly whisked into his own fantasy creation. The catalyst for this abduction is Holli herself, who lusts so mightily for life in the real world that she beckons Jack from his realm to help her make it across. Holli is a creature of lusts, as every inch of her anatomy illustrates. As a cartoon, Holli incessantly gyrates and grinds as if she's gulped a handful of Mexican jumping beans. And when the transformation from cartoon to flesh-and-blood actress occurs, the body language remains the same. The results fall far short of Jessica Rabbit's mark. What we get from Basinger here is the spectacle of the actress executing her impersonation of Marilyn Monroe while trying to twist herself into a human pretzel. It's not funny and, unless I'm the only human alive not turned on by an animated striptease, it's not sexy either. That doesn't leave much. The script (by Michael Grais and Mark Victor) includes a second relationship between a "noid," as the humans are called in the Cool World, and a "doodle," the name for animated characters. The noid is a detective named Frank (Brad Pitt) who was thrown into the Cool zone after he crashed his motorcycle, and his cartoon squeeze a foxy brunette. The couple are tight but they have a problem: Noids and doodles can't ... do it. Doing it, in fact, figures dramatically in the plot. It was "doing it" with Jack, a noid, that transformed Holli into a real person. So, like, couldn't Frank and his girl ... you know ... and transform her into a real person? What are the rules anyway? Technically, Bakshi's work is uneven; some of the characters in his Cool universe are hilarious, while others are flat. And the combination of live and animated action falls a notch below state of the art. The look of the production is fresh and, at times, even thrilling, but for the film to work, Bakshi has to make his artificial world seem real, and he never does. That's the animator's bottom line, and Bakshi leaves it blank. His only contribution is the irreverent, Vargas-girl variety sexuality that he made his trademark in"Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic." But is it really an innovation to provide a realistic jiggle to an animated breast?