by Jerry Roberts

April 13, 2003

Holli Would, the animated jiggly centerpiece of Ralph Bakshi's ill-conceived Cool World, isn't much different from Bakshi's usual image of animated females. She's got curves, she's got the jiggle, she's got all of the basic necessities to satisfy his fanbase of pre-teen boys but what she lacks is . . . well, anything besides the sum of her parts, like a personality for example.

For me, the discovery during the movie is that Kim Basinger is just as obnoxious animated as she is in real life and in this movie she plays both so I was able to make an impartial decision. That makes her perfect for Cool World an agonizing farce that marries animation and live-action but on a tech level seems more like a shot-gun wedding. Human characters walk through the animated world trying not to run through the process shots but come off looking like they're dodging meadow muffins. Late in the film when a live human puts him arm around an animated female, the composite is so bad that his arm seems to be hanging in mid air and his fingers look as though they are gouged into her shoulder.

The movie stars Gabriel Byrne, who has the screen presence of a wooden Indian, as Jack Deebs a cartoonist about to be released from prison. He has become a celebrity by creating a comic book called Cool World which is just an excuse to mask his obsession for his own creation, the bubbly, bouncy Holli Would (played by Basinger, first animated and then later for real). He then discovers, quite by accident that our world and his Cool World co-exist beside each other in parallel dimensions and that, through reasons never explained, a person from this world can magically end up in that one.

Not that you would ever want to go there because Deebs' Cool World is that kind of Bizarro World that Earthworm Jim might inhabit (sadly, minus the flying cow and the mountains of rubber tires). I'm not sure where Deebs' was in his design process but his world looks like he was in the middle of the second draft. The background looks okay with twisted bendy building and a sky made up of perpetual twilight but the characters in the foreground are washed out and far too bright to be put against the dark background. Not only are they too bright but they're all over the place!! Bakshi packs the screen full of these gnashing little animated characters who bounce and jump around the edges of the frame until you want to swat them like flies.

Byrne discovers that the universes exists in some kind of unstable equilibrium which can be disrupted with disastrous, but unspecified, consequences, if - you'll love this - a person from this world has sex with a person from that one. Now this would seem to be a dream come true for Jack as he finally gets the chance to do a little mackin' with his beloved Holli. But his reaction and his facial expression aren't much different then the same reaction that you have on your face as you stand in line at the bank.

We learn that if Jack and Holli make sweet, sweet love then Holli gets a chance to be real which turns out to be plot device #608 that is mentioned but never actually explained. It's sex, Bakshi figures, that's good enough. The problem is that the sex scene (like most of the movie) is edited with a chainsaw and the scene of Holli in the bedroom warming up is intercut with snippets of creatures outside banging each other on the head. We miss what is going on, what has happened and basically we missed what the movie promised from the very start.

I've never been a fan of Bakshi's because he seems to have a very limited imagination. His characters come in two flavors: Buxom, sexy babes and the men who drool over them. Five minutes is enough, but unfortunately Cool World lasts 99 minutes and we are forced to endure 94 minutes of Baskshi's impulses.

As a measure of my boredom, about ten minutes into this movie I suddenly became distracted by the EXIT sign over the door on the left side of the theater. Seems that the "X" was flickering and I watched patiently to see if it would go out. It flickered lightly and then every five minutes or so it would flash off and then back on again. Holding my watch up to the cinema light I began to time the bulb to see if it actually did flicker every five minutes or if it was just random. It wasn't dead on the money but it did flash every five or six minutes or so and it never went out. You don't want the light on the exit sign to go out on you during a movie, you never know when you might need to use it.