Fritz the Cat
All actors and roles (8)
All team (56)
Short description
Fritz the Cat follows a cat named Fritz who walks away from college life in late-1960s New York, dissatisfied with both his studies and the police presence around him. He sets out for San Francisco and drifts through a counterculture of drugs and casual sex, joining demonstrations in Harlem and falling in with a militant group plotting to blow up a power plant.
The film was directed by Ralph Bakshi, who also wrote the screenplay, with Steve Krantz producing. It was Bakshi's first feature as director, arriving before Coonskin, Wizards, The Lord of the Rings and American Pop. The voice cast includes Skip Hinnant as Fritz, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, Phil Seuling, Judy Engles, and Bakshi himself as the narrator and a pig cop. It is based on characters created by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, and it was the first animated American feature to receive an X rating.
Made for adults rather than children, it became a substantial commercial success, taking in roughly 25 million dollars worldwide, a large return for an independently produced animated film. On IMDb it holds 6.2 out of 10 from about 16,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.2 out of 10 from around 400 votes. A critics' rating also stands at 6.2 out of 10 from 22 reviews, so audiences and critics have judged it similarly.
What's left behind the scenes
- To film a scene in a Harlem bar, director and screenwriter Ralph Bakshi went to a park in Washington. There, he found several Black activists, invited them to the studio, and let them say whatever they pleased. He recorded their speeches, processed them, and edited them into lines for the film.
- Due to a modest budget, the entire animated film was created without so-called pencil tests (an early version of an animated scene consisting of sketches that are photographed or scanned; such tests are necessary for animators to see how their work looks in motion before the drawings move to the clean-up and coloring stage). Ralph Bakshi had to judge the animation timing by manually flipping through the sketches and drafts created by the animators.
- According to director and screenwriter Ralph Bakshi, the project lost two animators shortly after launch. One had no animation experience at all and wanted exclusively to draw obscene pictures, so he was fired. The second had some experience, but he was too embarrassed to tell his family that he made a living drawing for children and quit on his own.
- Initially, the sponsor and future distributor of the cartoon was Warner Bros. When director and screenwriter Ralph Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz showed a specially edited clip to the studio executives, the management was horrified and demanded that movie stars be hired for the voice acting and that the explicit scenes involving Fritz and Bertha (voiced by Rosetta LeNoir) be cut. Bakshi responded with a categorical refusal, and Warner Bros. withdrew from the project.
- To create backgrounds in the style of the film's screenwriter, Robert Crumb, animator Ira Turek used a technical pen. This is a professional tool for precise drafting and graphics, which was Crumb's preferred choice.
- According to director and screenwriter Ralph Bakshi, when he first met producer Steve Krantz, he told him about his plans to open a film studio dedicated to producing adult animated films. Bakshi intended to make 'Hard Way' as his first feature film. Krantz noted that Bakshi would have a better chance of securing funding if the project were an adaptation of adventures featuring pre-existing characters (and, consequently, belonged to an author according to copyright law). Thus, both arrived at the idea of adapting the story of Fritz the Cat, created by Robert Crumb. Bakshi said that he initially did not want to direct this film because he had spent many years working on animated series featuring animal characters and wanted to make a feature film with humans.
- The cartoon contains satire of Walt Disney's work. When American planes drop napalm on a predominantly Black neighborhood during a riot, the silhouettes of a joyful Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Donald Duck are shown on screen. In another episode, Fritz imagines a pink feline flying into his bedroom, which is a reference to the 'Pink Elephants on Parade' scene from the feature-length animated film 'Dumbo' (1941).
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
