Cool World is a downright strange film. Although it raises many intriguing ideas it fails to fully follow them through. What remains ambiguous is the extent to which the Cool World is in a fact a real realm or has been in part willed into existence by Pitt, as a result of his psychotic break with reality (a realm he does not want to return to), and then by kindred spirit Byrne, as a result of his loneliness and disillusion with reality. The Cool World is thus a constant but escapist realm, one of both madness and the imagination (which are inseparable in this film). Yet, the inhabitants of this alternate reality are just as valid as the real world, the film thus exploring the fascination of comic-book escapism: a look at the dream of every comic book reader to participate in the fantasy universe visualized before them. Bakshi has an apparent fondness for the underground comics ethos (hence his adaptation of Robert Crumb in Fritz the Cat) and here contemporizes his concern with what increasingly amounts to the bizarre eroticizing of cartoon figures and their relation to human sexuality. Indeed, the film becomes a quite perverse (but oddly restrained) study of a male sexual pathology aroused by drawings: exploring the idea that animation is erotic and even fetishistic. Although this is a provocative theme, it is left somewhat un-resolved: but how else is one to explain the sexuality that runs through this weird film?
In that respect, the film suggests that its characters’ fascination with the unattainable is the essence of escapist erotic fantasy. Pitt is attracted to a cartoon woman in the animated world but cannot sexually consummate his love. Byrne draws his ideal woman as a cartoon figure and prefers her company to the very real women who are quite prepared to offer themselves to him. Thus, when Basinger attains human form, Byrne is faced with the problem of what to do when his idealized, unattainable woman is suddenly alive – a balance that threatens to collapse the divisions between the real and the fantasy and to thus precipitate a psychotic confluence of sorts. That his ideal woman exists in an alternative universe also implies that a fetishistic comic book imagination indulges an erotification process. This preoccupation with a shared alternate universe is also a visualization of the interaction between the comic book creator (and by extension reader) and the comic book world itself. The amusing point is that just as these men delight in entering a comic book world so too aspects of that comic book world would seek to intrude on reality, hence the notion of the “cross-over”, itself a term in comics jargon. The film suggests that divisions between the real and the imaginary, however, can only be broken by sexual fantasy. Needless to add, the film is not for young children but nor can it ultimately shake its sense of adolescent erotica. read more