Street Sounds

By JAY COCKS

HEAVY TRAFFIC

Directed and Written by RALPH BAKSHI

Michael is a 22-year-old cartoonist who still lives with his parents in a grim flat on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

His mother is a nightmare Yiddisher mama, a shrieking, swooping, loony harridan who plies her son with brimming trays full of food. Papa is a smalltime Italian hood who looks like an eggplant with a two-day growth of beard.

Mama and Papa war around him, but Michael stays safe from the battle by losing himself in his cartoons.

Such fragments of urban naturalism are littered all through Heavy Traffic.

Its novelty derives not from originality of insight but from the fact that virtually the whole movie is a cartoon. Animation has seldom been used to express purely personal experience. Heavy Traffic not only has an authentic tenement toughness but the rough feeling of unassimilated autobiography, of experiences and fantasies still keenly felt.

The movie is thus indebted less to Disney than to underground cartoonists like R. Crumb. Director-Writer Bakshi, in fact, was responsible for the lamentable Fritz the Cat, a feature-length film about one of Crumb's most famous creations without any of Crumb's clout.

Heavy Traffic is an improvement over Fritz, but it shares its scurrilous atmosphere and flair for capturing the surreal violence of the big city.

Animation lets Bakshi run free with arresting fantasies. When Mama and Papa battle, Papa lays Mama out with a haymaker; Mama hurls a meat cleaver that catches Papa right in the crotch.

Michael's sexual initiation on a rooftop ends with a brawl and the girl's naked body dangling from a clothesline.

When the shock wears off, a few questions remain. Urban desperation is a familiar subject by now, and Bakshi's private fantasies may be more startling than original. The film is a grab bag of drawing styles and animation techniques, some used once, then discarded, others used scattershot throughout, giving the whole picture the chaotic consistency of an experimental sketchbook.

Although none of the visual ideas are new, some, like painting characters onto old movie footage, are still striking. Others are ostentatious. Michael, the Bakshi surrogate, is drawn with a cheap storybook realism while everyone else is grotesque. The hero looks like Snow White among the Seven Dwarfs, the kind of narcissism the movie not only indulges, but stresses. qed Jay Cocks

qed Ralph Bakshi tends to talk in manifestoes. "What I'm doing to animation," he proclaims, "is the same thing young film makers are doing to regular movies--cutting down budgets and gaining freedom that allows me to make the pictures I like. I want to do bang-out comedy. I also want to do The Penal Colony."

The world will have to wait a bit for the first cartoon Kafka. Right now Bakshi is finishing "a homage to the black man" in the form of a collection of Uncle Remus-style tales called Coonskin. As in all animation work, progress is slow because each movement, no matter how imperceptible in the finished product, requires a separate drawing. "We turn out twelve feet of film a week here," says Bakshi, who disdains the larger animation outfits in town that finish a hundred or more feet a week by using fewer drawings per foot and settling for less lively results.

Brought up in Brooklyn, Bakshi, 33, started drawing when a high school teacher praised his doodling talent. He began his career by turning out numerous television commercials and developing characters like Sad Cat for Terri Tunes. He moved to Los Angeles three years ago "because that's where all the animators are." The major studios had shut down their costly animation departments, enabling Bakshi to hire several of the best people in the field for his new independent company. A staff of 25 now works in a studio that looks like a cross between Santa's workbench and a Seventh Avenue sweatshop. "I treat animators as if they were actors," says Bakshi. "I tell them how a scene should work, what feeling people ought to go away with."

Bakshi lives with his wife and three children in an unfashionable section of Los Angeles called Hancock Park. He likes to spend spare time poring over his enormous collection of children's books, especially the work of such classic illustrators as Arthur Rackham and N.C. Wyeth. As for his ambitions, they are boundless. "I want animated films to operate on a whole new serious level," he says. "There are no limits. How about The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in animation? How about World War III in animation?"

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