Login
There’s a good idea for a more adult riff on Roger Rabbit’s gimmick buried somewhere beneath the failings, trappings and rumble of Cool World’s final product. Cool World currently exists as a prime example of studio interference resulting in an auterist’s film being deferred and denied at every turn.
One cannot simply talk about Cool World without discussing the problematic production that led to its birth, and the more unique concept that launched it. The film began life as Ralph Bakshi’s attempt to take the main conceit of Roger Rabbit and flip it inside out and twist it all around. That is to say, he wanted to make a more mature and adult film in which real actors and cartoons interacted. His concept was pretty perverse, but highly intriguing: a half-human/half-cartoon creature would escape from the animated world into the real one and seek vengeance on the father who gave it mutated life.
The studio got scared about a hard-R animated film and started to revise the script into more PG-13 territory, and then Kim Basinger signed on. Basinger wanted a movie that could be shown to sick kids in the hospital, so she essentially wanted another Roger Rabbit. So what we ended up with was a film with no real plot to speak of, a main character who wants to become a real person by seducing her creator, an artist erotically fixated on his creation, and a very young Brad Pitt added into the mix for no reason that I can logically understand. It’s a clashing, thunderous storm of kiddie and adult tones, highly sexual images and zany Looney Tunes style sight gags, cutesy animals and film noir atmospherics. None of it gels or makes any kind of coherent sense at any given moment, it’s bad, but strangely, hypnotically watchable. A siren’s call of a film which only leads to confusion as to why you even bothered to watch it in the first place, yet there’s still that glimmer of promise that was the original film lurking somewhere around the edges of the frame.
