About the film
- Released
- April 14, 1972
- Certification
- NC-17
- Country
- United States of America
- Starring
- Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, Phil Seuling, Judy Engles
More credits
- Language
- English, Yiddish
- Origin
- US
- Studios
- Steve Krantz Productions, Aurica Finance Company, Fritz Productions
- Belongs to
- Fritz the Cat Collection
- Written by
- Ralph Bakshi
- Produced by
- Steve Krantz, Jay Fukuto
- Cinematography
- Gene Borghi, Ted C. Bemiller
- Music
- Ray Shanklin, Ed Bogas
- Also starring
- Ralph Bakshi, Mary Dean, Charles Spidar
- Budget
- $700,000
- Box office
- $90,000,000
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.
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Learn about the link between Ralph Bakshi and George Lucas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htuOQIQ3ASk
The scene with the truck full of pigs (or sheep, or whatever) could not be topped.
FtC was Bakshi’s most interesting project, and had some really poignant moments like his crow mentor’s final scene that were genuinely well executed story-telling and animation. But it’s easy to see why Crumb would hate it enough to actually kill Fritz off in response. I’m a little surprised he gave him the rights to Fritz, but Bakshi always had genuine promise to deliver something cool (and lucrative) so…
Best description of Bakshi I ever saw was “a man who asked good questions but did not have good answers”
IF…., FRITZ THE CAT, MEDIUM COOL, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, CLOCKWORK ORANGE., THE DEVILS..great films rated x, as part of the old culture war.
Ever make it with an aardvark? We’re an endangered species.
At least he dealt with Crumb. He stole story ideas from me and images from my friend Bode.
Mike Movie Do tell! (For context, I’m an expatriate Hollywood writer who was ripped off at least a few times and explicitly advised not to make a stink. It’s not really in my nature to make a stink, but I kinda regret not taking action.)
Mike Movie — Yeah, I don’t know how anyone could call Necron 99 from Wizards anything but a blatant rip-off of Bodē’s Cobalt 60. I’ve read that Vaughn actually was in negotiation with Bakshi, but then he died unexpectedly and Bakshi just took stuff. I don’t know how true that is.
Robert A. Cook I do not recognize any mention of Ralph negotiating anything with Vaughn. I was in social contact with Vaughn. And after he died I did massive interviews with his friends and family to edit together a VB Memorial Issue of Inside Comics which was completed but never published, and I still have that entire archive of text and photos and layout boards. And at no point did anyone mention communication with Ralph.
I remember seeing that at the Southway 6 Theater during midnight movies.