Some movies I watched in 2024: Cool World
I’ve a bad habit of absorbing random information about esoteric subjects, despite never otherwise exposing myself to them. As such, I’ve picked up a buttload of trivia and opinions about Ralph Bakshi productions over the past decades, despite having only seen his Lord of the Rings adaptation and a couple episodes of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. I have heard many things about Cool World, few of them positive. So… fuck it. Let’s watch Cool World.
I don’t even know how to write a synopsis to segue into the actual assessment. You think it’s going to be a 1940s period piece, then a dude is snatched from reality into a world of cartoons. Then fifty years later a cartoonist keeps teleporting there randomly because a cartoon babe really wants his dick. The apocalypse nearly happens. None of it makes sense, just roll with it.
On paper, it’s hard not to make the comparison to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on account of the hume-toon interactions and all. It, uh, is not nearly as elaborate as that film, nor is the acting or animation as convincing.
The three lead actors do adequately in their roles, in that Brad Pitt and Kim Bassinger are very much one-note cartoons, and Gabriel Byrne looks like a frightened raccoon at all times. He does sells the drama of being caught between worlds, doubting his sanity and the reality of this conundrum, while still treating lusting over a cartoon woman like a religious experience.
The look of Cool World itself is incredible, like the embodiment of vice and excess taken to extremes. The painted backdrops sell the impression of a smoky city that just stretches on forever, even up into the sky with outrageous skyscrapers or gravity-defying highways. A cityscape that’s almost literally as much of a character as the actual cast, given how its buildings look like screaming faces.
I’m perhaps the one freak who likes how it looks across both mediums — the live-action sets rely heavily on stark painted-on shadows or even 2D cut-outs of props and furniture, most evident in Holly Wood’s apartment. It’s at odds with the internal logic and can certainly be seen as cheap as hell, but I think it looks stylish and surreal, appropriately unreal given the dream-like vibes of the whole thing.
That’s just a polite way of saying it’s a mess, though. For all the screentime set there and the lovely panning cityscapes, we never really get a handle on Cool World: it’s just a load of chaos. The animation is too frantic to keep up with or even tell where my attention is supposed to be drawn, and there’s so much nonsense constantly happening it’s overwhelming!
It’s like the visual equivalent of 4Kids’ dubbing practises — we can’t allow even a moment of silence, something has to be happening! Shove some animation on-screen! Brad Pitt will shift his weight and a knife will fling at where he once was, or an anvil will drop. Weird ghostly heads will drift by in the middle of a dialogue exchange, or an unrelated slapstick fight will take place in the middle of a conversation. It’s certainly a vibe, an experience like no other, whether that’s a good thing or not.
As a film, as a story, it’s so hard to give a shit. Everything’s so steeped in clichés and stereotypes of film noir, it’s hard to get past your surface level assumptions, if there even is anything beyond that. Holly Wood is envious of the real world, having seen a clip of a Marilyn Monroe movie — how did she get that? Who knows, who cares.
The detective says there’s nothing left for him there; “there’s a thousand ways to die, all of them permanent,” full of heartbreak and loneliness and other ways to disappoint you. But it’s not like he engages much in the toon world either, it’s just the chips he’s been dealt and he’s playing them as passionless as possible. Maybe you could read more into it if you were really invested, but the production’s real happy just playing with the thinnest of tropes and hoping that’ll tide you over.
Our modern culture of bashing IP together has made me extremely cynical of crossovers, but it goes to show how the familiar faces in Roger Rabbit help make us invested in its story. We know Daffy Duck and Betty Boop, so it builds on a base familiarity with how these fellas work, and makes us invested in the fate of Toon Town and the discrimination against them!
I’d trust its writing to be good enough to sell that even without a bunch of Warner Bros. characters, but it helps with the heavy lifting. It’s hard to say the same for Cool World; these are just a bunch of random cartoons that are hard to tell apart, too one-note and obnoxious to care about, and not even the humans have much depth to them.
There’s not enough to really make any of these plot beats really, truly work. It’s frustrating because in the moment, there’s rarely a dull moment! There’s always something happening, so many ideas and concepts to be fascinated by, as if this is a mystery to be solved. How and why is the cartoonist drawn into Cool World? Did he make it, and if so, how did it exist fifty years prior? Or did he just tap into its juices somehow?
Even when he’s let out of prison and visits the comic shop, it’s brought up that he killed a man for being in bed with his wife. It paints his character, for sure, but the events that follow are just too out-there to lean on that for dramatic effect or payoff or anything!
Brad Pitt as the detective is just so flat, bless him. He’s the one who has long sequences spent talking to rotoscoped dames, so he literally hasn’t much to work with, but it does help to paint his character as having traded his humanity for this gig. He’s traumatised after the death of his mother, there’s literally nothing back home for him to return to, so being the flatfoot of fun town is a bit he’s happily committed to.
Which is why Gabriel Byrne’s cartoonist is so strangely compelling, because he’s that bit trickier to pin down. It’s hard to say if he’s successful or famous, but he’s got a following in the comic shop, and his female neighbour is welcoming and amicable to him. But there’s clearly a dark edge to him, between the aforementioned murder, and having seemingly dedicated his life and home to his art.
The film’s so hard to follow I feel like I’m theorising on stuff it probably explains on-screen, but it comes across like Cool World is the world he wants to inhabit; his form of escapism, putting his psyche on paper as it were.
I’m always fascinated by how you always put a little bit of yourself into whatever you make, consciously or not, and there’s something to be said for that kind of character study. The metaphysical exploration of expressing yourself is what captivated me, because it’s so close to hitting on something great!
Instead so much of the story is wrapped up in sex. Holly Wood desperately wants to be real, seducing her creator and becoming human in the process, and after her transformative coitus she gushes about all her new sensations — she can taste things, she can touch things, she can feel! Except… was that not always the case?
For all the mindless violence and depravity in Cool World, it never gets into asking why. Because slapstick comes naturally to cartoons, I suppose, but it feels like a missed opportunity to explore that this is the only way they can feel.
Anything less than an anvil to the head simply doesn’t register on their receptors; they’re always chasing that high. We enact senseless cartoon violence because otherwise we feel nothing, and what is a cartoon without being loud and exuberant?
In fairness, if the movie did stop to address this, I more than likely missed it. It is a grating film to listen to, with non-stop prattling voices in every scene, that it’s hard to discern which of it is relevant and what’s just noise for the sake of noise. There is so much ADR in this! If someone’s far from the camera or their mouth is obscured, something will get dubbed in over it. It makes even the scenes set in the real world feel fake, because the cartoon urge to prattle endlessly is never far away…!
Anyway, Holly Wood fucks the cartoonist and becomes real, and wants to go to the real world, because…? I guess she’s got everyone curled around her finger in the cartoon world, and expects to do the same here as well? There’s a fun song and dance number in Las Vegas where she clearly enjoys the spotlight and being the centre of attention, until she starts intermittently returning to toon form, and now wants to merge the worlds, or something.
So much of the plot really is just introduced without explanation, making shit up because it needs a solution. Early on the detective finds the cartoonist and confiscates his fountain pen, warning him that carrying this is serious business. He doesn’t say how or why, and emptying its ink into a glass for his partner Nails to swig does not illuminate us either.
It’s only later that when Holly Wood uses the same pen to suck Nails inside of it, and it’s treated like a very real death, that I guess, oh, pens giveth life and taketh life away. I should’ve known! And also I feel I’m expecting too much of the film to run with a theme like that. Good thing that’s the only time it’s ever relevant!
It’s just so slapdash and haphazardly presented that even the simplest instance of a Chekov’s Gun feels like an ass-pull. The professor who pulled the detective into Cool World is completely absent after that introduction, and I thought it was safe to assume they needed him solely for exposition and nothing else. Turns out he successfully transported himself to the real world in the fifty years since. To what end? I’ve no idea, but it’s a good thing he’s here, because the film needs a shitload more exposition to explain this climax!
It is amusing that the entire plot hinges on the sexuality of cartoon women, yet the human women are almost glossed over. The detective’s mother gives a very sweet performance for what’s effectively an inciting incident and never mentioned again. The cartoonist’s neighbours are charming and appropriately neighbourly, I guess representing the good of humanity when the two leading men are so deep in their respective rabbit holes, but are thrust into the action without much warning in the third act.
They provide a fun bit of humanity and levity to what’s an increasingly stupid climax, someone to ask “what the fuck is going on?” amidst all this madness, even if their presence does make it that bit more cluttered. It’s just shocking that when the story turns into one lady’s libido potentially dooming the world (or whatever the fuck is going on, i can’t stress enough how incoherent it is), nobody stops to ask “wouldn’t you rather settle down with an ordinary woman instead?” Cartoon proportions make men do ridiculous things, I guess.
God, the climax is such a fucking mess, I can’t say it enough. So the detective gets pushed off a building, right? He’s fucking dead. And the girl they’re with is like, oh no, what now? So the professor says to the cartoonist, “now it’s time for you to fulfil your destiny as a hero,” as he grows stretchy cartoon hands that pull him to the top of the building.
Oh, really? We’re talking about destiny now? Really?! Now!?!
Destiny is such a cockamamie thing to pull out in any story in my book, but in this story, now of all times…!! I guess if he created Holly Wood then it’s a God and Adam situation, and he’s made a mess that needs to be sorted out. And he does so by turning into a superhero with a big bombastic voice and getting into an incoherent fight scene. Because, y’know, why wouldn’t he.
I’ve lost count of how many ass-pulls we’ve seen at this point, but at the last minute they rules-lawyer some baloney that the detective, because he was killed by a toon, becomes a toon himself, so he gets his happy ending. He’s free to fuck his cartoon girlfriend without world-ending consequences in his Funky Winkerbean-lookin’ bod.
I found myself more distressed by how the cartoonist sacrifices himself, in more ways than one, to seal himself and Holly Wood in what’s effectively purgatory. It’s played for laughs as he picks out decor for their new home together… but he’s no longer himself any more.
Brad Pitt’s voice and demeanour remain unchanged despite his cartoonishly broad shoulders, but every remnant of Gabriel Byrne is lost in his transformation — he doesn’t look like himself, sound like himself (he’s voiced by Maurice LaMarche!), or even act like himself in any way.
It’s established that the cartoon characters transform for the sake of a gag — flattened by anvils, wild takes, all that comedic slapstick stuff. But they don’t age or change or grow the way human begins do, I assume, so is it trying to say something there? Is the cartoonist’s attempt to mend his ways rewarded by completely erasing his former self? I don’t know, man. I just found it kind of distressing and unpleasant for what was shoehorned-in in response to test viewings.
I’m aware I’m talking about a film that’s extremely, aggressively heterosexual when I have no horse in that race, but boy is this movie a bit of a mess. Saying that, I love to see a film that has a vision behind it, however misguided or warped by executive meddling it may be.
I hate to be the hipster who groans “yuck, how corporate” upon seeing a modern blockbuster, but I genuinely enjoy experiencing a film that gives me something to think about and chew on — even if it’s invariably asking “what the fuck is happening?”, or “what were they thinking…?”
Cool World is a frustrating film; it’s a wild, interesting ride, in no way does it work as a finished product. Yet what a fascinating production, though…! It’s obviously not nearly as lavish or high budget as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but seeing the two of them address this fusion of film noir and cartoons is interesting. The art design is truly striking, especially in its moody environments, and I’d love to see more behind-the-scenes on it.
Bakshi’s been pretty upfront about the difficulty and interference in making it, that come shooting he wasn’t even working on the film he started, basically. It’s neat finally seeing a ‘true’ Ralph Bakshi production; it might not be ‘his’ film, but it’s an idea of how he expresses himself in his works, and I am fascinated. I just wish it had something more coherent to say than wanting to fuck a cartoon.
