Ralph Bakshi's mostly animated feature, "Heavy Traffic," is American graffiti of a very high and unusual order, a tale of a young New York City pilgrim named Michael, half-Italian, half-Jewish, ever innocent, and his progress through a metaphor that is nowhere near as dreary as it sounds: the pinball machine called Life. It is a liberating, arrogant sort of movie, crude, tough, vulgar, full of insult and wit and an awareness of the impermanence of all things….

Bakshi's "Heavy Traffic" is rated X, not because it's pornographic in any way but because it employs the small gestures and words of obscenity to make its rude statement about the quality of what might be dangerously described as the New York City Experience.

The opening of the film sets its moods as the screen goes from a live-action Michael, playing his pinball machine, to the animated world that lies just beyond reality. Michael, a would-be "underground" cartoonist, asks "What makes you happy? Where do you hide? Who do you trust?" And the voice carries over as two ancient jazz musicians in terrible repair meet while foraging through a garbage can….

With a poet's freedom (including the freedom from the fear he might be making an ass of himself), Bakshi conducts his misery-house tour of the quintessential modern metropolis, a New York City inhabited entirely by undesirables, junkies, whores, crooked cops, crooked union leaders, Mafia soldiers, craven dads, mad moms. The only two innocents are Michael and Carole, the pretty, no-nonsense black bartender who is also beloved by Shorty, the legless bouncer at her bar.

Bakshi's first feature, "Fritz The Cat," was criticized by purists for the liberties he took with a favorite underground comic strip. Now he has created his own world in "Heavy Traffic," which at its best moments is as nutty and bleak and beautiful as some scenes out of early Henry Miller, with whom Bakshi shares the inability to be entirely glum in the face of disaster. (p. 1)

"Heavy Traffic" wouldn't be much fun, however, if it were nothing more than an inventory of horrors. The fascination of "Heavy Traffic" is the way the horrors are turned inside out, most often for laughs but occasionally for reflections on love and loss. There is a most peculiar, most moving sequence in which Michael runs into his mom at a cheap Manhattan dance hall. She's being drunk and disorderly (her left breast just won't stay inside her dress) and then she glides off into a sodden reverie in which she's confronted by real photographs out of a not-quite-forgotten childhood.

There's also a very funny and sad rooftop encounter Michael has with a deranged old black man named Moe, who tells Michael cheerfully that he has come up to the roof to kill Michael's pigeons. Says Moe, who is suddenly sad: "I ain't there. Everybody plays like he's there. But they ain't there …"

Everyone in "Heavy Traffic" seems to think he's there or that he knows how to get there, including Snowflake, the transvestite who inevitably picks up the kind of rough trade who will beat the hell out of him when the truth is revealed. Even Michael and Carole think they know how to get there, which for them is California, a plan that is cruelly interrupted because if there's one thing Angie hates more than the idea that his son is a virgin, it's the idea that his son is sleeping with a black girl.

Bakshi's background images, which often mix animation with photographs and with well-known paintings (an Edward Hopper, for example), brilliantly evoke a New York that spans the 1930s to the 1960s. Even though the time seems always immediate, when Michael sits alone in the top balcony in some now long-removed Loew's picture palace, he is watching an actual clip from the Clark Gable-Jean Harlow film, "Red Dust" (1932).

In "Fritz The Cat," Bakshi's characters were animals. Here they are cartoon humans who, in themselves, are not very interesting to look at. They are the heritage of decades of Terrytoons and Looney Tunes and Max Fleischer work that never measured up to the Disney creations…. Yet this very ordinariness of the characters' looks, plus Bakshi's use of the most familiar sort of cartoon prerogatives (an assassinated Mafia godfather can continue to eat his spaghetti even though he is full of see-through bullet holes), are part of what I take to be a serious attempt to use the commonplace stratagems of one era to mock the nightmares of the era that came after.

"Heavy Traffic" may well turn out to be the most original American film of the year. (pp. 1-3)