RALPH BAKSHI COUNTER-CULTURE ANIMATION 'HEAVY TRAFFIC'

Title: HEAVY TRAFFIC Director: Ralph Bakshi Year: 1973 Rating: ****

Double-irony of Ralph Bashki's urban-animated HEAVY TRAFFIC in that he turned down making the sequel to his previous years' surprise blockbuster FRITZ THE CAT, based on Robert Crumb's underground comic, and chose to do a story that actually involves a young underground comic, who's not even known enough to be unknown, or even underground... and both the style of this very feature and the fictional artist's work is also very similar to Crumb's...

That aside, HEAVY solely belongs to Bakshi, who began his process of combining live-action footage along with animation... framed by a sporadic pinball game in process, representing the downtown world where characters bounce around spontaneously...

Combining live-action with animation in HEAVY TRAFFIC

Making this a hippie hangout flick... for hippies to watch stoned, and of course our young artist's a hippie... but he's never had sex, is stuck living with a loud Jewish mother and cheating Italian father: the latter against dock-strikes (and somehow mixed-up with the waterfront-mafia) while the former's against, basically, her husband...

If anything of Bakshi's would directly inspire THE SIMPSONS, the back-and-forth between the oblivious old-fashion dad-dolt and the curious yet clumsy, thrill-seeking son began here...

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

But the most important character is a street-savvy black chick that becomes (his full name is) Michael Corleone's girlfriend who, initially working at a modern speakeasy, discovers his talent... so the audience experiences life through the edgy/sexual artwork while the artist himself is on the verge of possibly being discovered...

Overall making Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC a literally symbolic journey into honing a style that, whether hit or miss, would carry him through the similarly-structured urban-followup COONSKIN to the infamous LORD OF THE RINGS (Michael looks a lot like Frodo) all the way to his COOL WORLD finale.

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

Frodo in LORD OF THE RINGS grows into Michael from HEAVY TRAFFIC

Voices by Joseph Kaufman and Beverly Hope Atkinson for HEAVY TRAFFIC

From Ralph Bakshi's HEAVY TRAFFIC

Voices by Joseph Kaufman and Beverly Hope Atkinson for HEAVY TRAFFIC

Voices by Joseph Kaufman and Beverly Hope Atkinson for HEAVY TRAFFIC

Frank DeKova voices for HEAVY TRAFFIC

Frank DeKova voices for HEAVY TRAFFIC

From HEAVY TRAFFIC

Chuck Berry sequence from HEAVY TRAFFIC