An animal cartoon earned the first X rating ever given to an animated feature in the United States.

FRITZ THE CAT (1972) follows a college-age tomcat through the drugs, sex, and radical politics of late-1960s America, voiced by Skip Hinnant and surrounded by a cast of crows, pigs, and hustlers drawn as a bestiary of the counterculture itself. Fritz talks revolution in coffeehouses, drops acid in a bathtub, and drifts from one disaster to the next, always chasing a cause or a woman, rarely finding either.

Ralph Bakshi directed, wrote, and narrates the film, adapting Robert Crumb's underground comic strip into feature animation. Crumb reportedly despised the result and killed off his own character in the comics soon after, but the film became the first animated feature to earn an X rating, and the highest-grossing independent animated film of its era.

Bakshi used the cartoon form to satirize race, protest, and the sexual revolution with a bluntness no studio picture would risk. It remains a landmark of adult animation, the film that proved cartoons could be made for grown-ups, and that grown-ups would show up.