Fritz the Cat (film)/Production

==Production==
===Funding and distribution===
With the rights to the character, Krantz and Bakshi set out to find a distributor, but Krantz states that "every major distributor turned it down" and that studios were unenthusiastic about producing an independent animated film due to the prominence of Walt Disney Animation Studios in animation, in addition to the fact that Fritz the Cat would be a very different animated film from what had previously been made.
In the spring of 1970, Warner Bros. agreed to fund and distribute the film. The Harlem sequences were the first to be completed. Krantz intended to release these scenes as a 15-minute short if the film's funding was pulled; Bakshi was nevertheless determined to complete the film as a feature. Late in November, Bakshi and Krantz screened a presentation reel for the studio with this sequence, pencil tests, and shots of Bakshi's storyboards. Bakshi stated, "You should have seen their faces in the screening room when I first screened a bit of Fritz. I'll remember their faces until I die. One of them left the room. Holy hell, you should have seen his face. 'Shut up, Frank! This is not the movie you're allowed to make!' And I said, Bullshit, I just made it."
The film's budget is disputed. In 1972, The Hollywood Reporter stated that Fritz the Cat recouped its costs in four months following its release. A year later the magazine reported that the film grossed $30 million worldwide and was produced on a budget of $1.3 million. In 1993, director Ralph Bakshi said "Fritz the Cat, to me, was an enormous budget -- at $850,000 -- compared to my Terrytoon budgets ..." In an interview published in 1980, Bakshi stated "We made the film for $700,000. Complete".
Warner executives wanted the sexual content toned down, and to cast big names for the voices. Bakshi refused, and Warner pulled their funding from the film, leading Krantz to seek funds elsewhere. This led to a deal with Jerry Gross, the owner of Cinemation Industries, a distributor specializing in exploitation films. Although Bakshi did not have enough time to pitch the film, Gross agreed to fund its production and distribute it, believing that it would fit in with his grindhouse slate. Further financing came from Saul Zaentz, who agreed to distribute the soundtrack album on his Fantasy Records label.
===Direction===
Bakshi was initially reluctant to direct Fritz the Cat because he had spent years working on animated productions featuring animal characters and wanted to make films focusing on human characters. He became interested in working on the film because he loved Crumb's work and considered him a "total genius". During the development of the film, Bakshi says that he "started to get giddy" when he "suddenly was able to get a pig that was a cop, and this particular other pig was Jewish, and I thought, 'Oh my God—a Jewish pig?' These were major steps forward, because in the initial Heckle and Jeckle for Terrytoons, they were two black guys running around. Which was hysterically funny and, I think, great—like Uncle Remus stuff. But they didn't play down south, and they had to change two black crows to two Englishmen. And I always told him that the black crows were funnier. So it was a slow awakening."
In his notes to animator Cosmo Anzilotti, Bakshi is precise, and even specifies that the crows smoked marijuana rather than tobacco. Bakshi states that "The weed had to read on screen. It's an important character detail." The film's opening sequence sets the satirical tone of the film. The setting of the story's period is not only established by a title, but also by a voiceover by Bakshi playing a character giving his account of the 1960s: "happy times, heavy times". The film's opening dialogue, by three construction workers on their lunch break, establishes many of the themes discussed in the film, including drug use, promiscuity, and the social and political climate of the era. When one of the workers urinates off of the scaffold, the film's credits play over a shot of the liquid falling against a black screen. When the credits end, it is shown that the construction worker has urinated on a long-haired hippie with a guitar. Karl F. Cohen writes that the film "is a product of the radical politics of the period. Bakshi's depiction of Fritz's life is colorful, funny, sexist, raw, violent, and outrageous."
Of his direction of the film, Bakshi stated, "My approach to animation as a director is live action. I don't approach it in the traditional animation ways. None of our characters get up and sing, because that's not the type of picture I'm trying to do. I want people to believe my characters are real, and it's hard to believe they're real if they start walking down the street singing." Bakshi wanted the film to be the antithesis of any animated film produced by the Walt Disney Company. Accordingly, Fritz the Cat includes two satirical references to Disney. In one scene, silhouettes of Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Donald Duck are shown cheering on the United States Air Force as it drops napalm on a black neighborhood during a riot. Another scene features a reference to the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence from Dumbo. A sequence of the camera panning across a garbage heap in an abandoned lot in Harlem sets up a visual device which recurs in Hey Good Lookin'.
===Writing===
The original screenplay consisted mostly of dialogue and featured only a few changes from Crumb's stories. The script and storyboards went largely unused in favor of more experimental storytelling techniques. Bakshi said, "I don't like to jump ahead on my films. The way you feel about a film on Day One, you may not feel the same way forty weeks down the road. Characters grow, so I wanted to have the option to change things, and strengthen my characters  ... It was sort of a stream of consciousness, and a learning process for myself." Bakshi wrote the characters without feral animal behavior to lend the material greater realism.
The first part of the film's plot was adapted from a self-titled story published in a 1968 issue of R. Crumb's Head Comix, while the second part is derived from "Fritz Bugs Out", which was serialized in the February to October 1968 issues of Cavalier, and the final part of the story contains elements of "Fritz the No-Good", first published in the September/October 1968 issue of Cavalier. The last half of the film makes a major departure from Crumb's work. Animation historian Michael Barrier describes this section of the film as being "much grimmer than Crumb's stories past that point, and far more violent." Bakshi stated that he deviated from the comics because he felt that the strips lacked depth:
It was cute, it was sweet, but there was nowhere to put it. That's why Crumb hates the picture, because I slipped a couple of things in there that he despises, like the rabbis—the pure Jewish stuff. Fritz can't hold that kind of commentary. Winston is 'just a typical Jewish broad from Brooklyn'.  ... [The strip] was cute and well-done, but there was nothing that had that much depth.
Bakshi's unwillingness to use anthropomorphic characters that behaved like feral animals led him to rewrite a scene in "Fritz Bugs Out" where Duke saves Fritz's life by flying while holding Fritz; in the film, Duke grabs a railing before the car crashes into the river, a solution that Bakshi wasn't entirely satisfied with, but prevented him from having to use any feral animal behavior in that scene.
In the film, there are two characters named "Winston" – one appears at the beginning and end of the film, the other is Fritz's girlfriend Winston Schwartz. Michael Barrier notes that Winston Schwartz (who appears prominently in "Fritz Bugs Out" and "Fritz the No-Good") never has a proper introduction in Bakshi's film, and interprets the naming of a separate character as Bakshi's attempt to reconcile this; however, the two characters look and sound nothing alike. Bakshi intended to end the film with Fritz's death, but Krantz objected to this ending, and Bakshi eventually changed it to the final ending.
===Casting===
The film's voice cast includes Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire, John McCurry, Judy Engles, and comic book distributor/convention organizer Phil Seuling. Hinnant, who would become known as a featured performer on The Electric Company, was cast because he "had such a naturally phony voice", according to Bakshi. Bakshi and Seuling improvised their dialogue as comically inept pig officers; Bakshi enjoyed working as a voice actor and later went on to provide voice roles for some of his other films. Bakshi re-created the voice he did in this film for the part of a storm trooper in his 1977 animated science fiction film Wizards.Bakshi, Ralph. Wizards DVD, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2004, audio commentary. ASIN: B0001NBMIK
===Audio design===
Some scenes used documentary recordings which were made by Bakshi and edited to fit the scene; these were used because Bakshi wanted the film to "feel real". According to Bakshi, "I made tons and tons of tapes.  ... When I went to have the film mixed, the sound engineers gave me all kinds of crap about the tracks not being professionally recorded; they didn't even want to mix the noise of bottles breaking in the background, street noise, tape hiss, all kinds of shit. They said it was unprofessional, but I didn't care." Although the sound designers insisted that Bakshi needed to re-record the dialogue in the studio, Bakshi persisted on their inclusion.
Almost all of the film's dialogue, except for that of a few of the main characters, was recorded entirely on the streets of New York City. For the film's opening sequence, Bakshi paid two construction workers US$50 each, and drank Scotch whisky with them, recording the conversation. In the Washington Square Park sequence, only Skip Hinnant was a professional actor; Fritz's friends were voiced by young males Bakshi found in the park. One of the sequences that was not based upon Crumb's comics involved a comic chase through a synagogue full of praying rabbis. For the voices of the rabbis, Bakshi used a documentary recording of his father and uncles. This scene continued to have a personal significance on Bakshi after his father and uncle died. Bakshi states, "Thank God I have their voices. I have my dad and family praying. It's so nice to hear now." Bakshi also went to a Harlem bar with a tape recorder and spent hours talking to black patrons, getting drunk with them as he asked them questions.
===Music===
The film's score was composed by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin. The soundtrack was released by Fantasy Records and Ampex Tapes, along with the single, "You're the Only Girl" b/w "Winston". The film also featured songs by Charles Earland, Cal Tjader, Bo Diddley, and Billie Holiday. Bakshi bought the rights to use Holiday's performance of the song "Yesterdays" for $35.
===Animation===
Many of the animators who worked on the film were professionals that Bakshi had previously worked with at Terrytoons, including Jim Tyer, John Gentilella, Nick Tafuri, Martin Taras, Larry Riley, and Cliff Augustine. According to Bakshi, it took quite a long time to assemble the right staff. Those who entered with a smirk, "wanting to be very dirty and draw filthy pictures", did not stay very long, and neither did those with a low tolerance for vulgarity. One cartoonist refused to draw a black crow shooting a pig policeman. Two female animators quit; one because she could not bring herself to tell her children what she did for a living, the other because she refused to draw exposed breasts.
In order to save money by eliminating the need for model sheets, Bakshi let animator John Sparey draw some of the first sequences of Fritz. Bakshi states that he knew that "Sparey would execute them beautifully." Poses from his sequences were photocopied and handed out to the rest of the crew. The film was produced almost entirely without pencil tests. According to Bakshi, "We pencil tested I'd say a thousand feet [of footage], tops. ... We do a major feature without pencil tests—that's tough. The timing falls off. I can always tell an animator to draw it better, and I know if the attitude of the characters is right, but the timing you really can't see." Bakshi had to judge the timing of the animation simply by flipping an animator's drawings in his hand, until he could see the completed animation on the screen. Veteran Warner Bros. animator Ted Bonnicksen was incredibly dedicated to his work on the film, to the point where he completed his animation for the synagogue sequence while suffering from leukemia, and would take the scenes home at night to work on them.
In May 1971, Bakshi moved his studio to Los Angeles to hire additional animators there. Some animators, including Rod Scribner, Dick Lundy, Virgil Walter Ross, Norman McCabe, and John Sparey, welcomed Bakshi's presence, and felt that Fritz the Cat would bring diversity to the animation industry. Other animators disliked Bakshi's presence, and placed an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter, stating that Bakshi's "filth" was unwelcome in California. According to Bakshi, "I didn't know who these guys were because I was from New York, so I threw the ad away." However, Bakshi found the negative reaction to the film from his peers to be disheartening.
===Cinematography===
Because it was cheaper for Ira Turek to trace photographs to create the backgrounds, Bakshi and Johnnie Vita walked around the streets of the Lower East Side, Washington Square Park, Chinatown and Harlem to take moody snapshots. Turek inked the outlines of these photographs onto cels with a Rapidograph, the technical pen preferred by Crumb, giving the film's backgrounds stylized realism that had never been portrayed in animation before. After Turek completed a background drawing in ink on an animation cel, the drawing would be photocopied onto watercolor paper for Vita and onto animation paper for use in matching the characters to the backgrounds. When Vita finished his painting, Turek's original drawing, on the cel, would be placed over the watercolor, obscuring the photocopy lines on the painting. However, not every background was taken from live-action sources. The tones of the watercolor backgrounds were influenced by the "Ash Can style" of painters, which includes George Luks and John French Sloan. The film also used bent and fisheye camera perspectives in order to replicate the way the film's hippies and hoodlums viewed the city.
==References==
Category:Production