Cool World (1992)

  I have apparently never seen this movie all the way through.  I had, however, seen bits and pieces from the middle of it from when I was a little girl and it was on TV occasionally.  Now I look back and marvel at the fact that I really didn't have a lot of adult supervision as a child.

Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) is just a typical G.I. home after WWII.  He takes his mother out for a spin on his new motorcycle and they are hit by a drunk driver.  Mom dies but Frank is accidentally transported to an alternate dimension of cartoons called Cool World.  Think Toon Town from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but way seedier.  Cool World only has a few hard and fast rules, but the most unbreakable is that humans don't have sex with cartoons.  Femme fatale Holli Would (Kim Basinger) wants to be a real girl more than anything and she's not about to let a few pesky laws stand in her way.  To this end, she seduces ex-con and cartoonist Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), who thinks he created Cool World, and brings him to the other side.  Now it's up to Frank to keep these two from boinking and disrupting the fabric of space and time as we know it.

I always thought Gabriel Byrne was the main character in this film, based on seeing the preview 900 times throughout my youth.  I guess that's because Brad Pitt wasn't a superstar in the early 90's while Byrne was an established actor.  I also didn't realize that Holli was a self-centered bitch willing to screw over any and everyone as long as she got her way.  That's because I hadn't had a lot of exposure to Ralph Bakshi as an 11-year-old.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Ralph Bakshi is a cartoonist responsible for Heavy Metal, Felix the Cat, and other adult-themed animations.  He's a very influential artist and had a huge hand in elevating cartoons to something beyond what you see in your Sunday paper.  His art is also surreal, crude in humor, and misogynistic.  His female characters look like blow-up dolls and are about half as smart.  You can't deny that the man has skill or style, however, whether or not its to your personal taste.

Bakshi wrote, directed, and did much of the art for Cool World and it's kind of a mixed bag.  Visually, it's interesting but the plot has more holes than Swiss cheese, characters are one-dimensional, and the direction is heavy on jump-cuts and animated establishing shots.  Maybe it's one of those movies that is improved by being on drugs.  I can't say.  It's certainly unforgettable, though.