Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Patience Watson
One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.
Francene Odetta
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
ShootingShark
Michael is an underground artist in New York City who draws strips of the people he sees around him. He hooks up with the beautiful Carol, but she loses her job in a bar and so the two go searching for the high life.Bakshi's films are hard to find, but it's more than worth the effort. Outside of Japan, he's really the only director in the world who has managed to make adult-oriented animation features, and his films are completely unique. Heavy Traffic is his most personal and probably his best too - it sucks you into the seedy seventies world of NYC and doesn't let go. On one level it's a shocking freakshow, filled with hustlers, transsexuals, down-and-outs, hookers and thugs, but only if you're a bit of a prude. It's really just a slice-of-life series of observations; some satirical, some gross, some tragic and all rendered in a wild array of visual styles - traditional cell animation, live action, multiple composites, filters and negatives, pencil-tests (the Maybellene sequence), near-subliminal stills, real movie clips (the film Michael watches in the empty cinema is Red Dust, with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow), stock shots, what have you. If nothing else, it bombards the viewer with a myriad of dazzling visual techniques. The film has many influences (Vaughn Bode, Robert Crumb, a sudden mock-up shot of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks) but Bakshi's direction is unique and his fearless experimentation with cinematic style is both admirable and rewarding. He not only plays with animation, he plays with styles within animation, like the incredible bullet-in-the-head moment, or the whole Mother Pile / Wanda The Last sequence. If the film has a weakness, it's that it's a bit episodic - crazy New York nights - but it's so overloaded with wild ideas and freaky moments that it doesn't spoil the flow, but just contributes to the freewheeling anarchy. The voice cast are cool, notably Atkinson, and there's a fabulous score by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin, featuring a memorable soul-fuelled cover of the traditional ballad Scarborough Fair. An acquired taste, for sure, but a must for real fans of animation, and check out any of Bakshi's other films (particularly Wizards and Cool World).
Juha Hämäläinen
Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic almost manages to beat his earlier 'Fritz the Cat' with its downbeat, very dark urban look and outrageous humor about different sides of life. It combines animation of different techniques and real-life footage with snippets of pop art, comics, advertisements and classic old movies. The result is simply a firework of a film. The main character Michael gets to know some hard facts of life while pin-balling between crazy home life and even crazier city life. The takes on sex, religion, race issues etc. may partly be a little dated in their early 70's ways but some deeper points and especially the humor still works in a timeless way. Bakshi's handling of the rather short but winding story and his technical ability to create memorable adult animation deserves repeated viewings in my eyes.
Mr_Mirage
Heavy Traffic is everything you've heard it is... laced with some kind of bizzare sexual reference every other second (it seems) as well as totally insane violence, this brutal, bizarre and strangely sad film is worth one viewing, if for no other reason that to show that in the early '70's, Bakshi was pointing towards a concept of animated film that is only now hinted at.I would suggest (okay, I AM suggesting) that a lot of Anime, and the useage of animated clips in both Natural Born Killers and Kill Bill (vol. I) point back to this particular film.My take: watching the hero in "real time" is what the film is showing, with the animated bits being more inside of his head, until the end, where he is blown off by the beautiful woman that he dreams of, where we see one event that exists in his head (notice that it fails, but begins with an act of violence against the pinball machine, and also notice that the man playing with the artificial gunfighter is gunned down while a man >?< is getting naked in the photo booth) and another that ends with a sense that in a few seconds the Mary Tyler Moore theme song is going to begin.What is real? Well, in the head of someone that creates movies held by the only boundries made inside one's own head, it is a pointless question...
Pepper Anne
If you typically like Bakshi's movies, this may not be a good one to start off on, nor likely one to watch at all. It is missing the artistic beauty of American Pop and the comedy of Hey Good Lookin'. It is jammed pack with a confusing story about sleazy city dwellers.The movie combines live action and animation, though the majority of the film is animation. It opens with a scene at an arcade, and Mike, the main character (both in the live action and animated segments) is playing a pinball game. As situations arise in the film, we are constantly referred back to this pinball game in progress, thus being forced to find the connection between the two. There are a lot of different characters here that all impact one another, eventually becoming one story. Mike is a cartoonist. His father is involved with the mafia. His mother is a drunk who wants to kill his father. His friend is a transvestite. And, he eventually picks up a former hooker/bartender as a girlfriend, and together, they're going to figure out how to get enough cash to get the hell out of the city and move out to the West Coast. The story is confusing however, not only in the amount of characters you have to keep track of and their place in all of these interconnected events, but often, you are confronted with scenes without dialogue or some that don't seem to connect to the rest of the movie. Plus, there's a whole lot of people just looking to get laid, so there are a lot of naked cartoons running around, which is a bit frustrating when you're looking for more, not less, to help you figure out what the heck was going on half the time.
Not to mention, once the cartoon story ends (consequently along with the pinball game), the live action story continues. Even though the fate of those live action characters were decided in the cartoon universe, it gets contradicted in what seemed like an unnecessary ending that also occurs in the live action universe. Bakshi cartoons are known for excellent animation, especially as you see it in American Pop, but Heavy Traffic, while fitting for it's day, doesn't have that same beautiful artistry as American Pop (even though there is about a twenty-five year difference between the release dates of the two films). I suppose, being one of Bakshi's earliest, it was more experimental than the later films. And it was one that I found difficult to appreciate.
