Fritz the Cat

Fritz the Cat is a comic book character created by Robert Crumb during the height of the underground comics movement of the 1960s. Crumb cast his character of Fritz as a trouble-making, anti-establishment, college-age figure whose adventures consisted of having sex with as many anthropomorphic female animals as possible, while staying one step ahead of the law.

The popularity of the character of Fritz the Cat led up-and-coming animation director Ralph Bakshi to make Fritz the star of his first animated feature film. Released to theaters in 1972, Bakshi's film Fritz the Cat was the first animated feature film to be rated X, something that had been unheard of in movies up until this film. The movie was a box-office hit, drawing in audiences as much for its shock value as for its appeal to the "love generation" of the 1960s.

The animated film is a satire on college life of the 1960s: while Fritz doesn't attend any classes during the movie, he participates in major social upheavals based around the popular college protest movement of the time. Fritz invites several girls to his "pad" for an orgy, does a lot of drugs, escapes when the place is raided by the police, takes part in organizing an angry, violent mob that riots against "authority" (without actually figuring out what the target of its anger is), is briefly associated with a terrorist group similar to the Black Panthers, and apparently "dies" at the film's climax (before coming back for one final roll in the hay with his young, nubile girlfriends).

Robert Crumb has famously stated that he detested Bakshi's film — so much so that he killed off the character of Fritz in his comics, by having an ostrich-woman stab him in the head with an ice pick. Critics and audiences were generally kinder to the film, however, and it is seen as something of a landmark in the history of animated films, as it was one of the first attempts to produce an animated film intended especially for adults.

An animated sequel to the movie was released in 1974, entitled The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. The sequel had nothing to do with Bakshi or Crumb, and it faded away quickly at the box office.

The success of Fritz the Cat also led to a brief fad within the adult film industry of producing pornographic animated short films, or inserting animated sequences into their live-action films, and releasing them to adult movie theaters with the slogan "X-rated and animated!"

External links

• The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat at the Internet Movie Database