Heavy Traffic: Ralph Bakshi

It's tempting to regard Ralph Bakshi's first three films as a kind of trilogy. All three involve social misanthropes trying to survive in New York City during the turbulent 60s and 70s. They featured Bakshi's adult-oriented take on animation which saw characters with simple designs juxtaposed with real-life footage and documentary-like audio. The first, Fritz the Cat (1972), was a savage attack on the 60s counter-culture. The third, Coonskin (1975), was a vicious examination on inner city black culture. Heavy Traffic, on the other hand, doesn't really have a political agenda (although several scenes can be politically interpreted). It simply follows the bizarre fantasies of a young cartoonist named Michael Corleone: his strained family life, his inability to get laid, his eventual relationship with a black bartender named Carole, the possibility of starting a life of crime, his father's messy relations with the mafia, etc, etc. Like Fritz the Cat and Coonskin, Heavy Traffic is full of lurid, grotesque, and extremely graphic depictions of nudity, sex, and violence. And yet, by examining these topics with such honesty and earnestness, Bakshi's work adopts a strange but undeniable humanism. I personally think that the film suffers because of its more free-form narrative techniques. Fritz the Cat and Coonskin were so focused that they hit like ballistic missiles. But Heavy Traffic is still an enjoyable and thought-provoking film by one of animation's greatest iconoclasts.

7/10