Cool World

"Cool World, Cool World"...oh, where do I begin? Let me first give the overly-simplistic plot of this movie: A returning WWII soldier named Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) loses his mother in a motorcycle-on-car accident, he then get's transported to "Cool World" which is a hellish, surrealistic alternate dimension where cartoons (called doodles) live. One of the big rules of this world is that noids (humans) aren't allowed to have sex with doodles as this could create interdimensional chaos across both realities. However, a sexy, female humanlike doodle named Holli Would wants to become a noid! For her plan to work, she needs Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a jailed cartoonist who's created a comic book series based on Cool World itself. Holli brings Jack into her world where she seduces and has sex with him, turning her into a human being. When this happens both Jack and Holli begin flickering inbetween human and cartoon states, their night of passion having ruptured the fabric between both worlds. Now Frank (who's now a cop in the Cool World) and Jack have to team up in order to stop Holli from removing a powerful Cool World artifact and unleashing animated hell on the real world! This movie has all of the ingridients to be a memorable one, but unfortunately there are way to many things and elements to it that are either hardly explained or not explained at all (see the movie to know what I'm talking about). The animation, musical score, and soundtrack are three more things that are done well in this movie, yet the acting and character development leave a lot to be desired because both of these elements are very flimsy in this movie! "Cool World" is, in my opinion, a worthy candidate for a remake because a remade "Cool World" CAN improve on the mistakes of this movie. The story can be reworked to be more understandable, more effort can be put into defining the characters, the acting can be a whole lot better, and the animation (it should still be hand-drawn, no CGI whatsoever) can be greatly improved upon. All in all, "Cool World" is a mixed bag of a film that I hope will be remade someday because this already has what it takes to be great, it just needs a director who can clearly tell the story, a cast that brings believability and definition to the characters, and the rest can just take care if itself. I recommend "Cool World" if you're a big animation buff or a fan of Ralph Bakshi (who directed this movie and hated every minute of doing it, look this movie up on "Wikipedia' and you'll see why).

There were some annoyingly base aspects to this movie, but that's to be expected of Bakshi. If taken for what it is, this is something very enjoyable to watch. The notion of an alternate dimension of animated characters parallel to our own is something fun to imagine, and the ramifications of the crossover are well toyed with in this movie. Overall, very well worth at least one watch. It's something not truly a classic, but very much worth ranking among other noteworthy animated and hybrid films.

Cool World is a surreal presentation by director Ralph Bakshi. Although many compare it to Roger Rabbit, Bakshi clearly wasn't trying to give the public a knockoff. He purposely kept the cartoon two-dimensional so that he could present Cool World as not a cartoons meet reality film, but more like a cartoon with reality film. This allowed him to create a new cartoon in his classic style, thus making Cool World enjoyable and poignant, if not entertaining.

A Who framed Roger Rabbit wannabe. Has a few moments, but not enough of them to save this movie. I found it had a weak plot and it really started to drag by the end of the film.