Cool World

Cool World (1992) is Ralph Bakshi's live-action and animation fantasy comedy, available to watch online on iFILM. A comic-book artist is pulled inside his own creation and falls hard for the cartoon bombshell he drew.

Jack Deebs, played by Gabriel Byrne, is the man behind Cool World, a lurid hand-drawn metropolis crawling with his own inventions. Its biggest star is Holli Would, voiced by Kim Basinger, and she wants just one thing: to become a real, flesh-and-blood woman. The only way there is to seduce a living human. When she drags Jack across the line, the fundamental rule of the universe breaks. Trying to hold things together is detective Frank Harris, a young Brad Pitt, the only other human walking around in all that ink.

Bakshi, the provocateur behind Fritz the Cat and the animated Lord of the Rings, fused photography and drawing well before the technique caught on. The result is jittery, garish and nowhere near family-friendly: acid colors, a frantic pace, sex bubbling under every frame. It is for fans of wild auteur animation and anyone curious to catch Pitt at the very start. Stream Cool World (1992) online on iFILM.