24 Years Later, the Weirdest Noir Fantasy of the '90s Is Officially Free on Streaming

Holli Would, and Holli did

It's a wonder that Ralph Bakshi's name isn't better-known than it is, because we're living in the future he created.

Bakshi was a solid 30 years ahead of the adult animation curve, starting in 1972 with the R. Crumb adaptation Fritz the Cat. He went on from there to make an early animated version of The Lord of the Rings, which is still his most famous project, alongside original films like American Pop, Fire and Ice, and Wizards. At time of writing, Bakshi’s last project before his retirement from filmmaking is 2015's Kickstarted indie short Last Days of Coney Island, which was briefly made available for free on YouTube.

If there's a single abiding theme in Bakshi's career, it's that he was usually too weird and surreal for audiences, critics, film executives, or all three at once. At the same time, you can see hints of Bakshi's influence in the surreal R-rated cartoons of the '90s and later, such as Liquid Television, Aeon Flux, or half the programs on the Adult Swim block. Not a lot of people are familiar with Bakshi's work, but of those who are, many of them apparently went on to work in animation.

Bakshi's last full-length film, 1992's Cool World, was a box office bomb that was abandoned almost on release by its distributor Paramount, and it still has a shockingly low critical average on Rotten Tomatoes. This seems to be Bakshi’s lot as a creator; either you gel with his style of filmmaking or you hate it, with no middle ground.

Cool World had a troubled production, and there are good reasons not to like it, but it's never boring. Cool World is currently up for free on YouTube, so now is as good a time as any to check it out for yourself.

Tex Avery's Grand Guignol

Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) just got out of prison. During his 10-year stretch for murder, Jack created a popular indie comic called Cool World, starring the femme fatale Holli Would. What Jack doesn't tell people is that Cool World and Holli are based on what he assumes to be his recurring hallucinations.

Upon his release, Jack is physically transported to Cool World. His "hallucinations" were visions of a real dimension, where cartoons ("doodles") inhabit a stylized 1940s Las Vegas. Holli brought Jack here to help her transform into a human (a "noid") so she can escape Cool World.

Earth and Cool World were never meant to interact, and Holli’s plan runs a serious risk of destabilizing both dimensions. Holli knows that, and doesn't care. That gets her in trouble with Frank Harris (Brad Pitt), the only human who lives in Cool World and one of its only cops. Jack gets caught in the middle between Frank and Holli, with both of his worlds potentially on the line.

Cartoon clash

Bakshi told IGN in 2004 that Cool World began as a horror story about the child of a cartoonist and a cartoon who came to the real world to find and kill his father. Paramount bought it and hired Bakshi to direct the movie, but on the first day, the producer handed Bakshi a new script that was only vaguely based on his own. Suddenly, Cool World was a PG-13 action fantasy.

The version of Cool World we actually got is a tour through animation history, full of deliberate stylistic clashes. Some characters are deliberate Disney knockoffs, others look like Don Bluth drew them, and even more are refugees from Tex Avery's cutting room floor, all freely ricocheting off of Byrne, Pitt, and one another. Except for Holli, none of Cool World's doodles ever just move when they could bounce, slither, or deform. The surrounding city is split between infinite highways, dark ruins, and strange industrial hellscapes. The deliberate visual inconsistency works to convey a sense of cheerful anarchy from the start. Cool World cannot be controlled, or even really understood.

Cool World has a reputation as being a store-brand version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but the two films don't actually have that much in common beyond their core concept. In fact, the closest comparison to Cool World might actually be 1981's Heavy Metal. Both movies are early entries into adult animation as a genre, and both are arguably precursors of what eventually became the New Weird. Big animation studios established certain rules, which smaller productions like this proceeded to deliberately break.

Modern viewers who grew up on anime, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Rick & Morty will absorb everything in Cool World without the slightest slow to their roll, but there was almost nothing else like it in 1992. In fact, there still isn't much else like it, not even from Bakshi himself. If you've got a couple of hours to kill, it's worth checking out for yourself, especially while it's free on YouTube.