It troubles me that I am almost totally unresponsive to Fritz the Cat, an animated cartoon feature, directed by Ralph Bakshi from the strip created by Robert Crumb for Head Comics. Fritz, a cat both in comic-book terms and in the current jargon, is super hip to every breeze that blew upon the country's questing youth of a few years ago, and the picture holds up his instant causes and borrowed principles to good-natured destruction. Thus Fritz, master lecher, organizes group sex in a bathtub, which exploit is raided by the prurient fuzz, and Fritz, the free-souled undergraduate, burns his lecture notes and with them one of the larger buildings on New York University's Greenwich Village campus….

[One understands] that Fritz the Cat is bent on depreciating youthful follies, while not overlooking the worse than foolish responses of the alarmed and puzzled establishmentarian elders. In principle, I should applaud such iconoclasm, and in principle I do. It is the execution I deplore.

My spirits began to droop when the two cops sent to spoil the fun in the bathtub turned out to be pigs (Disney's little pigs grown up and turned gross), who spoke in the "da (gulp)" accents popularly associated with mental deficiency. They fell still further when I discovered that the blacks were to be presented as crows (though the finery of these birds did trick me into some racist snickers). It isn't the bad taste I object to (I won't also be tricked into protesting the manners of a picture whose style consists in boasting that it has none), but the lack of invention. Portraying the police as pigs and the blacks as crows—or for that matter the insouciant hero as a cat—does not add much to the picturesqueness of contemporary imagery.

It occurred to me early in the proceedings that the picture expected its very high level of outrageousness to cover up its quite low level of imagination. As the one-for-one equivalents were rolled out in bold and rude succession, I felt my face turning wooden from exposure to a human comedy that never found a perspective for comment other than the mechanical one of exaggeration. There are some funny lines—whether or not Crumb originals I do not know—most of them depending on the almost infallible device of understatement. However, the episodes and characters seem to me utterly devoid of the ironic twist that makes satire the cruelest of blood sports. It is all "zap!, powie!, dirty word," and on to the next obvious foible. Even in the interest of redressing the balance, I find that procedure wearisome.

A good thing—far and away the best thing—about [Fritz the Cat] was the graphic treatment of the New York City background. The scenes were drawn in a sketchy, melancholy sepia, and then at the end, when the closing credits were being run, these renderings reverted to photographs of the forlorn, scaling, garbagy neighborhoods through which all New Yorkers go their ways. The artists responsible seemed to be saying that, kidding aside, New York is no joke. That's right.