For Animator Ralph Bakshi, the World Is a Very Cool Place : Animation: The creator of ‘Fritz the Cat’ breaks back into movies with ‘Cool World,’ a film about an artist trapped in his own creation.

It’s been two decades since Ralph Bakshi burst onto the scene, a guerrilla animator out of Walt Disney’s worst nightmares. For a few years in the early ‘70s, beginning with the X-rated “Fritz the Cat,” Bakshi created an outrageous string of animated features that simultaneously won him recognition from the Museum of Modern Art and notoriety as the man who dragged cartoons into the gutter. “If Snow White suddenly opened a brothel, she might find herself in a Bakshi feature,” one critic observed.

Now, after spending most of the ‘80s in self-imposed exile on a farm outside New York City, the man who would make Snow White a madam is back with “Cool World,” a live-action/animated film starring Kim Basinger as a calculating seductress and Gabriel Byrne as a cartoonist who’s in over his head. And this time, to borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, it’s like deja vu all over again.

“Cool World” is based on the notion that cartoons inhabit a parallel universe, a two-dimensional plane that 3-D humans--like comic-strip creator Jack Deebs, a none-too-stable character played by Byrne--fall into at their peril. Deebs, who’s just finished a jail term for murdering his wife’s lover, finds himself catapulted into one of his own cartoons and caught there.

For the 56-year-old Bakshi--whose readiness to offend became a trap 17 years ago when his third feature, “Coonskin,” was denounced as racist by black activists and dropped like a hot potato by Paramount--the parallels are obvious.

“It’s the idea of being imprisoned by something you create,” says producer Frank Mancuso Jr., on a visit to Bakshi’s Burbank animation studio from his office at--where else?--Paramount.

“Yeah,” says Bakshi, a stocky figure with salt-and-pepper hair and a crude kind of charm. “That’s a conflict for me.”

Actually, it’s conflict for both of them. The project began two years ago when Bakshi, having returned to animation with a revival of “Mighty Mouse” for CBS, came to Mancuso with an idea for an animated horror film. Mancuso, who got his start producing films in the “Friday the 13th” series and has been trying to get away from them ever since, was, well, horrified. But he was also intrigued, and when he suggested to Bakshi that they instead make a movie about a guy who can’t escape his own creations, “Cool World” was born.

The picture hinges on the idea that Holli Would, the curvaceous cartoon character that Jack Deebs creates, wants to break out into the real world--and that in order to do so, she has to seduce Jack. Leaving aside the question of how a 3-D human is going to have sex with a 2-D cartoon (the new Bakshi, it seems, is not that graphic), this scenario opens up some worrisome issues: What’s the relationship between creativity and emotional disturbance? Can sex tip you over the edge? And what is reality, anyway?

“This film is an elaborate Freudian castration-anxiety dream,” says Larry Gross, a screenwriter (“48 HRS.”) who wrote much of the script but goes uncredited due to the decision of a Writers Guild arbitration panel. “He fantasizes her, he invents her and she takes on a life of her own. It’s an allegory of male fear.” In other words, “Snow White” meets “Fatal Attraction.”

Bakshi’s animation studio--a cinder-block building across from a lumberyard in an industrial section of Burbank--is a long way from Disney. At other studios, animation is a carefully regimented process: Characters are detailed in elaborate character sheets to maintain continuity, storyboards are followed religiously and young animators are expected to pay their dues and work their way up the system. “Here there is no system,” says one young animator, a freshly minted CalArts grad.

“Ralph had storyboards done two years ago, but he never follows them,” says another. “He gets bored pretty quickly. He’s kind of funny that way.”

“He’s extreme,” admits associate producer Vikki Williams. Mancuso concurs. “What interests me most about Ralph is his irreverence. I’ve very comfortable with saying, ‘Who says you can’t do this?’ ” Mancuso says.

“He says it to his wife every Friday night,” Bakshi quips, erupting into a maniacally high-pitched titter. “Exactly.”

Actually, in some ways Bakshi is very much a traditionalist. His animation is done the old-fashioned way (no computers), and the parallel universe theme in “Cool World” has been used so often it’s hoary. “Howard the Duck,” the moronic 1986 production based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, was about a talking duck who gets beamed down to Cleveland. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the 1988 Robert Zemeckis film that set the standard for combining live action with animation, was based on the idea that cartoons and humans coexist in this world. All of them owe a debt to Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell,” in which cartoon characters jump out of an inkwell and scamper up their creator’s arm.

“It wasn’t ‘Roger Rabbit’ that inspired us to do this,” Bakshi says, “although it might have been ‘Roger Rabbit’s’ success that inspired Paramount to buy it.”

Commercially, Bakshi’s return can be seen as part of the current animation revival, which started with “Roger Rabbit” and picked up speed with Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (which last winter became the first animated feature to win an Oscar nomination for best picture). Artistically, however, Bakshi has more in common with Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist who tackled the Holocaust in his best-selling “Maus” books, than with Zemeckis or anyone at Disney.

Despite his involvement in “Mighty Mouse” (which, predictably, got him in trouble with anti-drug crusaders who thought the hero’s flower-sniffing was a reference to cocaine), Bakshi has little use for the Saturday-morning-cartoon school of animation. The artists he identifies with are the turn-of-the-century New York painters of the Ashcan School, who rebelled against prevailing concepts of acceptable subject matter and depicted tenements and tenement-dwellers instead.

Growing up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn ghetto that during the ‘40s and ‘50s was a melting pot of Jews, Italians and blacks, Bakshi developed a similar fascination with the harsher side of life. “Fritz the Cat,” his first picture, based on R. Crumb’s underground comics, featured a raunchy cast of anthropomorphized animals as sex-obsessed student revolutionaries hanging out in Greenwich Village during the ‘60s. He followed that with “Heavy Traffic,” about a slum kid who draws cartoons in his bedroom while his shrieking Jewish mother aims a meat cleaver at his faithless Italian father.

Raw and explosive and wildly inventive, “Heavy Traffic” established Bakshi as a talent to be reckoned with, if not to be savored. It offered nudity, shootouts, even a cartoon within the cartoon in which God has sex with a virgin and is killed by his son, who says, “You’ve been connin’ us for years.” As the film curator at the Museum of Modern Art put it, “If you are not offended by ‘Heavy Traffic,’ perhaps you are not offendable.”

For his third feature, however, Bakshi picked the wrong target at the wrong time. “Coonskin” (1975) was a scathing look at a black ghetto populated by pimps, whores and ersatz revolutionaries and controlled by corrupt cops and white gangsters. No sooner was it screened in public than Bakshi was denounced by leaders of the Congress of Racial Equality.

The “Coonskin” experience, Bakshi says now, “changed my life. I had a hard time selling politically oriented films after that.” His next feature, “Hey, Good Lookin’,” languished on the shelf for seven years before Warner Bros. finally released it in 1982. In the meantime, he turned to fantasy with an animated version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” The result, though it did well at the box office, was uninspired, and after completing a couple of other films, Bakshi closed his animation studio, sold his house in Hancock Park and moved with his wife and children to a farm in the northern reaches of Westchester County in New York.

Then, after nearly eight years of making paintings in his barn, Bakshi decided to return to animation. “I got tired of staring at my shoes,” he says by way of explanation, “and economically, painting isn’t going to pay the rent.” Once again, his goal has been to demonstrate that he can handle serious themes--violence, pathology, urban decay--as effectively as, say, Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets.”

“That’s not an ambition,” he declares, suddenly bridling. “That’s what I’ve done for 13 movies. Animation is my medium. I see no reason to be restricted as an artist.”

“There is only one art form that the filmmaker has complete control over, and that’s animation,” explains Mancuso, a lanky young man in blue jeans and cowboy boots. “It’s the blankest, widest, most open canvas there is. But if you go to some exec and say, ‘I want to do an animated “Naked Lunch,” ’ they look at you like, ‘What’s your problem? Animation is for kids, and kids don’t read “Naked Lunch.” ’ “

“This doesn’t mean that I won’t make a kids’ film,” Bakshi puts in. “But it won’t be a Disney film. All these rip-offs--Disney has a right to make a Disney film. But to do that kind of film makes you ask of any animator, why should I spend my life sucking off another man’s tremendous ability?”