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The late 1960's, the time of the hippies, the civil rights movement,
the Black Panthers, ...: Fritz the Cat, a typical student lacking both
ambition and goal, decides he's tired of learning and rather wants to shag
around ... and soon enough, he's at a party in a bathtub with three naked
ladies ... which would be great, until everybody else at the party joins
them in the bathtub and Fritz feels left out ... but he's getting better
when he smokes some reefer. Then though the police (in this film they are
literally pigs) busts the (drug-)party, and Fritz is the only one who
escapes.
A comical chase leads Fritz first to a Synagogue, then to Harlem, where
he tries to hook up with the crows (standing in for Afro-Americans), who
this year are supposed to be the cool folks. Fritz claims to understand
the crows' plight, but then he makes the fatal mistake to call a bartender
boy - ouch. Duke, a crow who feels sorry for Fritz, can only just
save him from a proper lynching ...
Later, Duke takes Fritz to a drug den, where Fritz smokes his brains
out and has sex with a fat crow ... when suddenly he realizes his goal in
life is to start the revolution. Of course, Fritz' revolution is
based on nothing but a few over-used slogans, but thanks to two cops who
are as ambitious as they are silly, Fritz starts a race-riot, and when his
friend Duke is shot (accidently), he realizes the fun is over and he has
to go underground ...
EVentually, Fritz realizes New York has gotten too hot for him and he
leaves the town with his girlfriend Harriet in her Volkswagen ... and soon
enough they end up in the desert with no more gas. But when Harriet wants
to send him to get gas, this is way too burgeois for him, and he decides
to instead leave her and become a bum.
Soon enough, Fritz hooks up with John and his revolutionary cycle, but
since Fritz has no political beliefs of his own whatsoever, he doesn't
realize they are in fact Nazis, and even when they gangrape a girl he
doesn't wake up. He even helps them placing explosives in a powerstation,
only then he realizes something is wrong ... but then too, the
powerstation goes boom, and Fritz with it.
Fritz did not die though, he's only seriously wounded and at a hospital
under police custody ... but that doesn't keep him from having an orgy
with four chicks ...
Now this is one cool animated film, it is (like Robert Crumb's comics
in fact) at the same time underground and counter culture and a parody of
underground and counter culture, with its lead character Fritz being at
the same time the intellectual student and political activist as well as a
guy with no single political view of his own and his knowledge coming
exclusively from popular literature ... and both intellect and politics
have to take back-seat once it comes to fucking. But in Fritz the Cat,
social satire does not come off heave-handed but wickedly funny (as social
satire is supposed to be) and intentionally controversial and politically
in-correct (years before the term political correctness was even
first coined).
Compared to Robert Crumb's ingenious comics, the film Fritz the Cat only
fares second best, but taken by its own merits, its a fun ride back to and
fun satire of the late 1960'/early 70's, with much of the satire relevant
even today.
Recommended.
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