Understatement is not the method of "Fritz The Cat," which utilizes just about every four-letter word you've ever heard in any playground, and depicts Fritz's various sexual triumphs with what might be described as indelicate frenzy. However, the film is not to be confused with those soberly obscene comic books that used to feature Toots and Casper, Dick Tracy and Tillie The Toiler. It is often exuberantly vulgar, but rather less obscene than your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, R-rated Hollywood melodrama, probably because Fritz himself is essentially an innocent of the early Jack Lemmon mold. He's the kind of cat who can be rendered instantaneously impotent with guilt when a Harlem madam laughs at him and says something like: "Honey, you ain't black enough!" (pp. 1, 3)

I suspect there is something in "Fritz The Cat" to offend just about everyone over the age of 17—blacks, whites, Jews, gentiles, Catholics, radicals, conservatives. Ironically, people under 17, who won't be allowed to see the X-rated film, are probably most familiar with cartoonist [Robert] Crumb, whose work I've somehow missed. Thus I've no idea how faithful Mr. Bakshi, who wrote and directed the film …, [has] been to Mr. Crumb's original creations. Compared to something like "The Yellow Submarine," the visual style of "Fritz The Cat" is almost drab, or, to put it another way, it's spectacular Terrytoon. It doesn't exactly advance the fine art of animation, which is all to the good, and it is absolutely right for Fritz's adventures, which reflect the world as a low-life cartoon and not as a psychedelic experience. There are, however, some lovely set pieces—line drawings and washes of cityscapes, highly stylized transitions between sequences (including one featuring Billie Holiday's voice singing "Yesterdays"), and an oddly moving ending in which the drawings slowly give way to sepia still photographs of ordinary streets and sidewalks, and of the real Times Square where there is not, as there is in Fritz's world, a sign proclaiming "Natural Gas Is Best."…

"Fritz The Cat" has its ups and downs. But its ups are of surprisingly high and witty order, and make use not only of conventional visual devices but also of a quite unconventional soundtrack that throws away more bits of sincerely lunatic dialogue than you're likely to overhear in several years of pub-crawling through Greenwich Village, Harlem and dissident points west.

At this point I suppose I should point out that "Fritz The Cat" isn't the completely dirty movie it pretends to be (POW!ZAP!), but an intelligent social satire (GULP! WEEP!). Unlike Wyatt and Billy of "Easy Rider," who went out to look for America and found it wasn't there, Fritz finds America all right, and he survives it by exercising his Priapian talents with the kind of enthusiasm that is, unfortunately, possible only to cartoon creatures. (p. 3)