![]() ![]() The film looks at life in a tough NYC neighborhood during the '70s. ![]() Despite graphic content, Heavy Traffic is not interested in mere shock value. In one of the most disturbing scenes, Michael's father hires a repugnant prostitute to take his son's virginity she ends up raping the young man. (Sometimes both.) These topics are preoccupations for both Michael and Bakshi. The plot purposefully meanders, occasionally stopping to go down some weird alley, but whatever is happening onscreen almost always involves sex or violence. After this scenario resolves itself, the movie switches back to live action to reveal that it's all basically a fantasy, or at least a story Michael created to play out his own inner demons. This doesn't sit well with his racist, mob-connected father, who orders a hit on Michael. Michael is a virgin who lives with his eternally-bickering parents and hangs out at a local pub, where he yearns for an African-American bartender named Carol. It then switches to animation, as we see vignettes from Michael's life, as well as some moments with the seedy people (drug addicts, hookers, etc.) who inhabit his neighborhood. The movie starts off in live action, with actor Joseph Kaufmann playing the character in an introductory segment. It's nominally the tale of Michael Corleone, a half-Italian, half-Jewish New York cartoonist with a passion for pinball. Heavy Traffic is a very impressionistic movie, to say the least. (He is said to have a new film in progress.) Bakshi's most acclaimed movie, however, is probably Heavy Traffic, released in 1973 with a X rating, and now on Blu-Ray from the fine folks at Shout! Factory. By the '90s, the filmmaker was battling a major studio – Paramount butchered his Cool World into an incoherent, if oddly fascinating, mess – before largely disappearing. Bakshi made a version of The Lord of the Rings more than twenty years before Peter Jackson did, and he controversially attempted to satirize racism with 1975's Coonskin. His debut film, Fritz the Cat, earned an X rating, making an early argument that animated features weren't necessarily just for kids. Ralph Bakshi was one of the most unique individuals working in cinema during the 1970s and 1980s. ![]()
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