Heavy Traffic (1973)
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Heavy Traffic Movie Review
Heavy Traffic is a 1973 adult animated comedy film directed by Ralph Bakshi. It’s one of his worst and most overrated movies.
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“I died the day I married a goy!“
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First and foremost, let’s touch upon the film’s reception. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the critics cherish this film so much. If they wanted to pick such of his early films, they should have chosen much better ‘Fritz the Cat’, even if that movie is just okay and nothing more. But this one is bad, certainly worse than that film, and pretty much one of the most overrated animated films of all time.
There is nothing to talk about here when it comes to its story. Yes, the film is basically plotless. It literally has scene after scene of unconnected imagery or situations which don’t have a bigger purpose other than to showcase “the ugliness of New York City”. There is not a single connective tissue or thread to be found here, not a single moment of profound themes or message. There is no story here and there is no point to this movie.
Although you can say that the film is edgy and certainly interesting and amusing in some scenes, most of those scenes are nonetheless extremely offensive, especially for today’s society. You have a character here who is a trans black woman and she gets beaten up constantly and is portrayed as the ugliest character visually. Needless to say, that leads to this film being enormously transphobic/homophobic and racist at the same time. The film is also very sexist and xenophobic toward some other characters.
The characters are so bad and weakly developed. Michael is so uninteresting and the fact that he basically gets raped by a black female hooker and the movie portrays that as somewhat of a good thing just further goes to show how dated this film is and its views are. Carole is okay, but Snowflake is naturally horrible as I have already stated above.
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Heavy Traffic is well edited and solidly animated. ‘Fritz’ had better animation, but this one is also solid with pretty good character designs and some solid imagery. The artistic sequences with the kaleidoscope and stuff are also pretty fine. The score I also really liked. Technically the film is okay, but it’s so obsessed with sex, filth, violence etc. that it made for one awfully archaic 70s flick.
Heavy Traffic is well animated and very well scored, but that’s about it. The characters are horrible stereotypes that should offend anyone watching the film and the plot is non-existent as the film consists of a series of pointless, unconnected sequences of sex and violence. It’s a bad, frustrating and very dated 70s flick and certainly one of the most annoyingly overrated animated films of all time.
