This movie was perpetrated by Ralph Bakshi, whose movie "The Lord of the Rings" is reviewed by Dave on the main page. Now, I'm sure Bakshi is famous for some good movie somewhere or studio executives wouldn't keep giving him money. But "Cool World" sure isn't it.

Cool World is this movie's version of Toontown. The toons are called doodles, while the real folk are called noids. This is so we remember that we're not watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

The plot:

Prologue, 1945. Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) gets pulled into Cool World by the professor just after his mother is killed in a motorcycle accident. Fast-forward to 1992. Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) is released from prison after serving a sentence for killing his wife's lover. He turns out to be the creator of a popular series of comic books called "Cool World" which parallel the real Cool World. It's ambiguously suggested that Jack has some kind of special powers when it comes to Cool World. The main character in his comic books is Holli Would, a femme fatale with whom he is obsessed.

Somehow, Holli (Kim Basinger) pulls Jack from the real world into Cool World and attempts to seduce him. Frank, not a day older and now a police officer, shows up several times and issues dire warnings and vague maledictions. Frank's doodle girlfriend, Lanette, gets Frank to explain to us how doodles and noids aren't supposed to "do it." "Doing it" is a major theme in this movie. And that's exactly how they say it, too. You can practically hear the quotation marks.

Eventually, Holli and Jack "do it," and she turns into a real person. She escapes with Jack into the real world but finds that she starts slipping back into her doodle form. She meets the professor and he explains that to become permanently real she must find "the spike" and hold on to it for some undefined duration of time until something vague happens.

Frank, his partner, the professor, and Jack all meet up and go after Holli to stop her from getting the spike. Frank *finally* explains his vague warnings. The connection between the two worlds is tenuous, and people flipping back and forth between doodle and noid and Cool World and the real world could destroy the universe. Frank doesn't explain why he's kept this vital information to himself for the entire movie.

The spike is on the top of a building, and Frank attempts to stop Holli from climbing to get it. She pushes him off the building. Jack, seeing that the most heroic male character has bitten the dust, begins staring at his hands. They turn into doodle hands, and he uses them to pull himself up and try to stop Holli. But Holli gets hold of the spike...and the world does not end. Instead, noids turn into doodles. The real world turns into Cool World. And everything gets really, really weird.

After a few minutes of general insanity, wherein Jack turns into a ridiculous cartoon superhero, he takes the spike and puts it back where it belongs. And everything in the real world turns back to normal.

Frank's partner takes Frank's body back to Lanette. After weeping over his body for a while, Lanette suddenly looks up. Wait a minute, she says. When a noid is killed by a doodle, he turns into a doodle himself! And pop! There stands Frank in doodle form, as healthy as ever! Aargh! That's the stupidest deus ex machina I've ever seen in my life! Why didn't he turn into a doodle right away, instead of waiting until after Lanette had a good cry? Why did the writers suddenly introduce this rule at the very last minute? Obviously so the movie could finish with a hurried HappilyEverAfterTheEnd.

So Frank and Lanette run off, and we see Holli and Jack (still in his silly superhero doodle form) picking out china for their little cottage together. The End.

One of the problems with this movie is the acting. These are not untalented actors. But Gabriel Byrne is largely inactive throughout the movie. In fact, he doesn't do anything of consequence except save the world at the last minute. Pitt is evidently trying to portray a Sam Spade/Rick Blaine type character, but he's so cool and aloof that he might as well be inanimate.

Holli is drawn as an animated Marilyn Monroe. But she comes off as a bad imitation of Jessica Rabbit, with fewer clothes. She sways her hips so much that it's difficult to see how she stays upright. She's so over-idealized that she slips into parody. And she's no better as a human either, since Basinger does her best to duplicate the animated Holli's constant gyrating and twitching.

And who are we supposed to be rooting for, anyway? Basinger and Byrne are both credited above Pitt, but it's Frank who does most of the work in the movie. If it weren't for the professor's cry of "He's becoming a hero!" when Jack turns into superhero doodle form, I'd have concluded that this movie doesn't have a hero.

Then there's the wretched production values. The interaction between doodles and noids is very, very poorly animated. When Frank puts his arm around Lanette, it's impossible to believe even for a second that it's real. Many of the sets are flat cardboard cutouts. They may have been used to blend in with the animated characters, but they just look cheap. Brad Pitt even trips over one.

Rating: Four turkeys, if you can put up with animated weirdness.

Scenes to watch for: Every so often bizarre doodles will chase each other across the screen. They don't interact with the characters in the movie. They don't look like they're even *in* the movie.

Things that make you go "Huh?": What exactly are the rules governing the whole doodle/noid transformation? Is it one-way? Does it matter which one is male or female? I sure hope so, or there is some weird sub-text going on here. I mean, Holli can't be a "real" woman until has a "real" man? Oh, please. And at the end, once Holli has a handsome hero at her side, she forgets her desire to be real and settles down to a doodle domestic life? Yeah, right.