Fritz the Cat (1972)

dir Ralph Bakshi

“You ever made it with an aardvark before? Rare opportunity, ya know. We’re scarce.”

I gotta be honest: I was fine with the pot-fueled bathtub orgy but I really started stressing out when the pigs showed up.

This is a messy one. We’re dealing with an X rated animated film about anthropomorphic animals, so a lot of people are going to be sensitive to that right off the bat. This film might not be for you! I have to remind myself of this constantly when it comes to recommending stuff to people. Still shaking my head over the time I told a client to bring a date to Pink Flamingos. I forget that not everyone is nice about a gaping asshole on the big screen! It’s sort of no different than when someone is really into the Saw movies or Martyrs, though. We all have our boundaries and that’s great.

Fritz the Cat is a tough pill to swallow in 2026. This was made a little over 50 years ago, which doesn’t excuse its grossness, but it does explain its presence. There’s overt racist depictions in the first 20 minutes, including Black people drawn as crows and a scene in a synagogue that actually had me pausing the movie and considering if I wanted to continue watching. I’m not in the habit of leaving a film unfinished, so I pulled up Letterboxd, Reddit, and Wikipedia (I’m not above Wikipedia. This isn’t a school paper.) and read a little more about the writer and director, Ralph Bakshi, and original illustrator, Robert Crumb. I kept watching, but I’m not justifying the racist, antisemitic, misogynist depictions present in this one. Sometimes art really does make us uncomfortable and to me, it’s an opportunity to think about the deeper stuff at play within ourselves. What are our values? Where are our limits? What do we stand for? What do we stand against? We live in a world of injustice, a world with a very violent past and present. It’s not as simple as refusing to look at the stuff that makes us uncomfortable.

I kinda dug it when the dude playing pool in the bar grabbed Fritz by the collar, ashed his cigar inside his shirt, and told Fritz to stop saying he understood the race problem. Can you even play pool solo? I never knew that was a thing.

Love the tits.