capsule : wretched , supposedly fanciful combination of animation and live action that puts a fat nail in ralph bakshi's career coffin . cool world was stalled and then re-started when roger rabbit took theaters by storm . based on what's on screen , it should have remained stalled . it's a haphazardly-assembled movie that nobody thought very much about , except in how it would look . and even there they didn't do much thinking . brad pitt ( called frank harris ) opens the movie , shortly after " the war " . after coming home , he rides on a motorcycle with his mother , gets into an accident , and somehow manages to breach a path into a parallel dimension called , none too surprisingly , cool world . the inhabitants are cartoons , called doodles -- although based on the mouth/dialog mismatch , i suspect they were originally called toons before the adr people decided to avoid trouble . flash-forward . jack deebs ( gabriel byrne ) is a comic-book creator who's about to get out of prison . we learn though various incompetently-placed bits and pieces of exposition that he landed there when he murdered the guy who was duking his wife , although like a lot of things in this movie , that kind of behavior is not shown to really be a part of his personality . it's just sort of dropped in . but deebs has bigger problems : he keep sliding back and forth between reality and the world of his comics , which is , of course , cool world . and then one day he lands there for keeps , and is instantly hit upon by sexbomb doodle holli would ( " realized " by kim basinger , who has gone on to prove that she is , in fact , a very capable actress ) . cool world tries to set up the " rules " about its universe and falls flat on its face . for instance , doodles and humans are never supposed to have sex , for reasons that are never made clear . worse , the consequences of such intercourse are depicted later in the movie , but they're so confusing and nonsensical that we don't even care . the movie's look is frantic and inconsistent . bakshi's animation has never been long on clarity , and cool world looks like a hashish-crazed version of those jack davis cartoons in mad , where grotty-looking maniacs all chase each other around the room . the art direction , staging , 'tweening , and everything else are pitched so hard and so far over the top that it's impossible to focus on anything . there is less imagination at work here than anthologizing . everything looks bizarre for the sake of being bizarre , and the " ironic " contrasts ( the little fluffy bunnies , etc . ) are just witless . the live-action backdrops also don't look credible . bakshi , in an interview , lovingly described how the sets were created by simply projecting cels of animation onto them and then having the builders paint using the projections as guidelines . the results aren't like a cartoon come to life ; they look like a very bad set for a school play . one of the walls vibrates disturbingly when pitt throws byrne against it . the story shows the signs of a script , and a movie , that were hacked to shreds and then pieced back together on the editing table . an interesting way to find out about tampering is to read the comic-book tie-ins or novelizations of movies : you frequently see a lot of material that existed in the shooting script , provided to the artists or writers of the tie-ins , but never made it to the screen . cool world's tie-ins not only have a totally different ending , but show the fingerprints of meddling all the way through . at no point , i guess , did anyone take a look at his story and decide it simply wasn't enough -- that there needed to be a clear line of logic from beginning to end , that the characters had to be motivated by other things than passing whims , and that we get more out of the movie than a juicy headache . ralph bakshi seems to have been an artifact of a very particular time . his earlier movies , like heavy traffic and street fight , were inconsistent , but also funny and nasty in hallucinatory ways . then he tried to create more upscale work , like the spastic wizards and the over-touted lord of the rings productions . now this . he hasn't done anything since , has he ? -----== posted via deja news , the leader in internet discussion ==----- <a href= " http : //www . dejanews . com/ " >http : //www . dejanews . com/</a> now offering spam-free web-based newsreading 
