One of the animated films revolves around a set of dramatic events, where Frank is transferred to a moving world called 'Cool World'. Seven years later, cartoonist Jack Depp created a comic book called Cool World, which features the Holy Will. Holly expresses her desire to enter the real world, but she refuses help from Frank, who is now an informer in a cold world. Shortly before, after his release from prison, Jack is transferred to a cold world and is smuggled into a club by Holly.
Watching Byrne, Basinger and Pitt struggle to bring verisimilitude to this cockeyed business is painful. And watching the parade of ricocheting doodles is just headache-inducing.
Director Ralph Bakshi looked set to produce an adult version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit with this mix of animation and live action, but somewhere down the line it ran out of steam.
After the painstaking technical bravado of Roger Rabbit, it's no longer possible to get away with scenes in which a cartoon has obviously just been pasted onto an actor's wooden movements.
Much ballyhooed, much-advertised, the live-action/animation feature is much disaster. Not even an animated Kim Basinger dancing the hoochie-coochie can save it from its own death-wish combination of outsized ambition and undersized budget.
The plot is too sketchy to provide much of a framework, and the only logic here is the logic of fevered daydreams. Yet, in spurts, the movie's enjoyable.
Bakshi's world is typically subversive, anti-nostalgic and, at times, a brilliantly conceived grafting of two and three dimensions. Unfortunately, its ingenuity matrix seems to have short-circuited.
A few of Bakshi`s inventions, such as a rattled telephone that panics every time it rings, are amusing and well animated, but most of the characters are grating and dislikable.
