‘Cool’ Review

Originally published August 21, 1992, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #979

There is definitely a perverse aspect to my nature.

It’s the aspect that prompts me to look at how BID placed in the CBG polls, and focus not on how many people voted BID as their most favorite, but instead how many people voted it as their least. Last year eight people targeted BID as the feature they most abhor. This year, we’re down to three. I was extremely upset about this, because it meant that I wasn’t doing my job and ticking off enough people.

I was only able to take solace in the possibility that maybe all eight of last year’s people cancelled their subscriptions and that these were three brand new people—which would mean a net gain of three rather than a net loss of five.

Another example of that perverse aspect is that, the more people who tell me not to waste my time seeing a movie, the more my interest is piqued. Critics and close friends badmouthed Return to Oz, for example, and long-time readers of BID will recall that I liked that film quite a bit—and even went so far as to state that the plot was more coherent than the sainted Wizard of Oz.

Which brings us to Cool World.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a film that didn’t feature Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Segal, and yet was so thoroughly and uniformly despised by critics.

Our local newspaper lists a chart on Sundays with recently opened films and how they fared with reviewers nationwide, ranging from the Boston Globe to the Hollywood Reporter. No other film in the current listing had as uniformly bad reviews. Even the reviled Man Trouble got at least a mixed notice from the Hollywood Reporter.

I hadn’t seen this much venom dripped on a film since Buckaroo Banzai opened and critics came out of one of the best SF films ever made saying “Huh? What happened? I don’t get it.”

But at least with Buckaroo, I had friends telling me that I must not miss it. With Cool World, people whose opinion I respect were saying, “Don’t bother. The plot is boring. The plot is confusing. It’s filled with gratuitous sex. It’s nowhere near as good animation as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (which was the general song of the reviewers as well). Don’t waste your time or money,” I was warned.

Well, it’s my money. It’s my time. And with the intrepid Myra at my side, who shares my taste for taking on reviled films, I saw Cool World.

Now I should say that there’s a tremendously liberating feeling going to a film that is widely despised. You see, when you go to a movie, you bring with you a set of expectations. You expect, or at least hope, that you will be entertained. That’s all. If a film changes your life or addresses deep societal problems or causes you to lose sleep at night, that’s all well and good. But first, your attention has to be caught and kept. As Paddy Chayefsky put it, purveyors of entertainment are in “the boredom killing business.”

If everything you’ve heard leads you to believe that a movie is going to be lousy, you enter the film with a different set of expectations than if you’re going in cold, or if the preliminary buzz has been good. The pressure, to a large degree, is off. If you think a movie is going to be terrible, what’s the absolute worst that can happen? It turns out you agree with everyone else. (A good example is Nightflyers, which played in local theaters for one week, which was exactly seven days too long. Or the unwatchable Captain America film, which was never released and hopefully never will be.)

It’s like being a coroner, a job that was described by one comedian as the easiest job in the world, because what’s the worst that could happen? The patient’s already dead. (The toughest job, by the way, was being a bank guard in Alaska. Why? Everyone is wearing ski masks.)

But if you anticipate a crummy film, and there’s anything—anything—positive at all, then the good aspects shine like a beacon.

So when the lights came up after Cool World ended, I turned to Myra and said in utter confusion, “Did we see the same movie everybody else did?” She didn’t think so.

I’m sorry. I thought Cool World was a perfectly entertaining film.

It wasn’t especially deep, and it certainly had its problems. But it had a coherent plot that built correctly, which puts it ahead of Batman Returns. I didn’t feel disappointed with it, which puts it ahead of Alien 3 although, admittedly, I came into Alien 3 with far greater expectations than I did for Cool World. The bottom line to me is that, not only did I have a pretty good time, but I thought it was one of Ralph Bakshi’s better efforts.

Here is the “complicated, boring” plot of Cool World:

A scientist in an alternate dimension/parallel universe/fill-in-the-blank continuum called “Cool World,” conducts an experiment that opens a rift between Cool World (populated by animated individuals called Doodles) and our own world, populated by Noids (short for Humanoids, presumably, rather than the little guy in the Domino pizza commercials).

The first connection occurs in 1945, and a returning soldier named Frank (Brad Pitt) is sucked in. Frank, due to recent events, has no interest in returning to the world of Noids, and so he and the scientist strike a deal.

Frank remains in Cool World, joining the Cool World Police Department and, apparently, being put in charge of all Doodle/Noid relations. The scientist, in turn, heads to earth, and together the two of them guard the passageway between earth and Cool World. For the rift, now that it’s been opened, can never be truly closed. Instead it’s merely “stoppered,” bottled up by a diamond shaped spike of the scientist’s design that holds it all together.

Flash forward to 1991, as the safety of not only Cool World, but the entire space-time continuum, is threatened by a trampy doodle named Holli Would (Kim Basinger), who desires nothing but to be real. She aims to achieve her goal using the one means through which such a transformation is possible: Sex with a Noid. The Noid, being, in this case, an artist named Jack (Gabriel Byrne) who she manages to (you should pardon the expression) draw into the middle of her plans.

And, of course, if Holly manages to get her hands on the spike and unplug the tunnel, then all hëll—or at least, all Cool World—will break loose.

There. That doesn’t seem overly complicated to me.

Considering Bakshi’s history of rotoscoping, and virtually filming entire live-action films over which he then animated, the only surprise is that it took this long for him to do a film that weds the two.

It’s not always a storybook marriage. Cool World could have used about, oh, another $5 million and about another six months. There are places where animation is just downright sloppy. Characters shimmer, or are partly transparent. Frank’s doodle girl friend oftentimes looks like little more than colored-in pencil tests.

But where the animation does work, it’s great. Holli slinks through the film in as sexy a manner as we’ve ever seen from a toon/doodle/toodle/whatever. There are a number of in-jokey Disney riffs, including a rabbit that wandered in from the set, looking completely bewildered when faced with a typical group of Bakshi-esque animated thugs. (It’s kind of like the reaction you’d probably anticipate if Walt Disney returned and were shown “Ren and Stimpy.”) Not to mention a sequence later on that is a direct spoof of “Night on Bald Mountain.”

A bit where several of Holli’s flunkies build a tower of junk in order to clamber up it and spy on her is hysterical—particularly when it all comes crashing down, and they single-mindedly start all over again. What makes it work is the hard-driving kinetic energy.

That’s what pushes all of Cool World along. There’s always something happening in the background of every shot. Something is constantly going on, to the point where you can border on sensory overload. Objects and characters fly across the screen with breakneck speed, barely pausing long enough for us to see them before they vanish back into the ether that spawned them. Half-finished pencil drawings waft through like passing thoughts.

It’s Toon Town on acid. I have friends who claim that they’ve always been stoned when they watched Fantasia. Having never been stoned, I can only suspect that something approximating the Cool World is what they saw.

“Gratuitous sex?” Where? The sex aspect of Cool World is not only not gratuitous, but in fact it’s integral to the plot. Furthermore, the one sex scene that is depicted, Holli and her partner remain clothed. There’s no nudity, drawn or otherwise. Considering past flesh-fests like Heavy Metal, that’s a hëll of a lot of restraint.

Every single review I’ve read—every single person I’ve spoken to—has commented that the animation is nowhere near as convincing as Roger Rabbit. To my mind, that mindset completely misses the point.

Many people seem to think that the big breakthrough in Roger Rabbit was the way that Roger and the Toons impacted on the physical world (breaking dishes, moving furniture and so on.) This is incorrect. Granted, Roger Rabbit did so to an unprecedented and unparalleled degree. But prop work was nothing new.

Roger Rabbit‘s breakthrough was that, until then, cameras had always remained “locked down” when portraying human/animation interaction. Roger Rabbit broke away from the lock down “rule,” and shifted camera angles within shots. Aided by skilled animation and computer-supplemented shading, the Toons seemed as three dimensional as any of the actors. The credibility of Roger Rabbit hinged on this, because the audience had to believe that the Toons were, in every way, real.

Cool World returns, for the most part, to the lock down camera school, and consequently, Cool World seems flatter than Roger Rabbit. Less “realistic.”

But the entire point of the Cool World realm is that it’s not real. Not real by our standards, at any rate. Holli’s entire motivation hinges on that she wants to get away from the unreal conventions of Cool World, and so there’s no need for the painstaking efforts that Roger Rabbit took. Cool World isn’t trying to accomplish the same thing. The stories aren’t the same, the characters aren’t the same. Nothing about the two movies is the same, except that there’s interaction between animation and live action.

So blowing off Cool World because it doesn’t have the same look and feel that the groundbreaking Roger Rabbit had would be the same as turning up your nose at a tidy thriller such as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle because it’s nowhere near as powerful as, say Psycho.

The story has a basic “anything goes” feel to it, in keeping with the Cool World environment. The happy-ending denouement of the film literally comes out of nowhere, but then again, as I’ve stated before, Wizard of Oz did nothing to set up that witches could be melted by water and that little story turn doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

The toughest part of a film such as this is the actors trying to work with characters who are going to be animated in later. They succeed to varying degrees. Brad Pitt is no more than adequate as Frank, and the film could have benefitted tremendously from a Christian Slater in the role. Gabriel Byrne does fine as Jack—a guy who is in way over his head when he becomes involved with Holli.

The true standout is Basinger, who not only does a superb job vocally as Holli (the way she punctuates the “K” in “Jack” is deliriously sexy), but also does extremely well in her live-action sequences. Basinger only has a few scenes where, as a real-life woman, she gets to interact with animated characters. But she makes the most of those sequences, turning in a performance that has got to be up there with Bob Hoskins’ utterly convincing work in Roger Rabbit.

Between Cool World and Honey I Blew Up the Kid, Las Vegas is taking something of a beating. I think I’ll be steering clear of it this year, at least until the giant babies and berserk Toons are safely transferred to videotape.

A couple of things of interest to comics fans. There’s one scene that was filmed in a Golden Apple Comic Store. Prominently displayed are a Golden Apple T-shirt, and a copy of Comics Buyer’s Guide in a stand-up display at the counter. The cashier is played by Carrie Hamilton, Carol Burnett’s daughter. Too bad. I was hoping Flaxen might wander through.

Also, there is a superhero spoof late in the movie that features a character who bears a striking resemblance to Jim Valentino’s “Captain Everything” (with a dollop of Don Simpson’s “Megaton Man” thrown in). It’s inspired stuff, and if Bakshi is looking for another live action/animation combo film, I’d recommend he option normalman. Imagine, say, a live-action Rick Moranis, wandering through a Bakshi-animated world of superbeings.

Sounds cool.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, also likes to see films that other people hate, so that he can say to himself, “Well, if someone made this piece of garbage, then maybe one of the six screenplays I’ve written has a chance.” He still has the screenplay he wrote four years ago about a female baseball player, which he tried to get his then-agent to market, saying, “Maybe Penny Marshall would like to direct it! And… and Geena Davis would be perfect to star!” To which then-agent replied, “Penny Marshall wouldn’t be interested, Geena Davis wouldn’t be convincing, and besides, no one wants to see a movie about women playing baseball.”)