Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
While incarcerated for murder, cartoonist Jack Deebs found escape by creating Cool World, a series featuring a voluptuous femme fatale named Holli Would. But the artist becomes a prisoner of his own fantasies when Holli transports Jack into Cool World with a scheme to seduce him and bring herself to life. Hard-boiled detective Frank Harris – the only other human in Cool World – cautions Jack with the law: Noids (humans) don't have sex with doodles (cartoons). However, flesh proves weaker than ink as Holli takes human form in Las Vegas, staring in a trans-universal chase that threatens the destruction of both worlds.
Cool World is a messy, unfulfilled concept that squanders a genuinely interesting premise. The plot is muddled and inconsistent, failing to build coherent rules or emotional stakes for its live-action/animation hybrid world. Acting is weak across the board — Kim Basinger is cartoonishly flat in a role that demands more, Brad Pitt is underused, and Gabriel Byrne seems lost. Cinematography earns a modest above-average for Ralph Bakshi's visually chaotic but occasionally inventive blending of live action and animation, with some striking compositions in the Cool World sequences. Novelty gets credit for being a genuinely strange adult-oriented hybrid that predates and differs from Who Framed Roger Rabbit in tone and ambition, even if it never coheres — it has a singular, grimy aesthetic that marks it as unmistakably a Bakshi production. The ending is rushed and unsatisfying, resolving the trans-dimensional threat with little dramatic payoff and leaving character arcs incomplete.