Roger Rabbit is the most memorable of it's kind, Cool World is the most forgettable.
Anything but cool, Cool World is a bizarre mixture of live-action and animation. The story follows a doodle named Holli from the animated realm Cool World who’s trying to cross over to the real-world. Starring Brad Pitt, Kim Basinger, and Gabriel Byrne, the cast has some talent; but they’re not used particularly well. Additionally, the animated character designs are incredibly generic and grimy. But what really hurts the film is Ralph Bakshi’s directing, which is overly busy with nonsensical cartoon action that’s not related to what’s happening in the scenes. And, the actors are poorly integrated into the animation (and vice versa). A crazy mess of a film, Cool World tries to do too much and ends up failing at everything.
Review by RothSothyBlockedParent2016-05-06T06:06:35Z
I finally saw this for the first time tonight, and wow! I'm quite impressed with the concept they got going with the alternate worlds: Cool World vs the Real World, and "doodles" vs "noids". It's definitely not one to watch when kids are around; this one is for the more mature audiences; just a bit more than Roger Rabbit, that's for sure. Interesting that I chose to watch this tonight because Mother's Day is just right around the corner, and the opening scene does start out with an accident with the lead character and his mother. The soundtrack fits the world as well; there's a lot of early Techno and electronic beats being played during the Cool World scenes, and even some Frank Sinatra later on to give each world its signicant contrast. Being an avid listener of Trance and electronic dance music myself, I recognized the Future Sound of London track, Papua New Guinea, as soon as I heard it. The plot isn't all that great, but I mostly enjoyed it for the hand-drawn animations in combination with the live-action real sets made to look 2D, connection between the characters, and just the atmosphere that Ralph Bakshi has created which has this very wild, toony, yet dark and weird look to it; very Tim Burton-like. There were some trippy-looking sequences towards the end too. Films like these come about once a decade. The latest one I think was Disney's Enchanted(?). It's rare to see films covering theme of the real world and animated "toon" world (that's hand-drawn, not CGI); especially ones with the rotoscoping technique which is used to make animated characters look life-like (as seen in early Disney films). As we roll to the credits music, I immediately recognized the voice of the late David Bowie and I was right. I would really love to own this film remastered on Blu-ray with many extras/bonus material if it were possible, knowing the current out-of-print DVD release fetches for a very high price online. In the meantime, I'm off to see more works from Ralph Bakshi on Blu-ray.