First off, I don't give a damn about political correctness so no points off. Second, I grew up in the inner city so no points off for grittiness.However, I do want to watch a movie with something interesting to say other than people are mean to each other and out for their own self-interest. That's 90 percent of the movie. His dad is a POS Italian misogynistic womanizer works for the mob. His mom is a bitter Jewish shrew. He's just a lost asshole animator who wants to sell "Wizards".Feel free to watch it if you're wasted and want to watch some poorly drawn violent dark stupidity.Oh, btw, everything is excusable since Bakshi is making a statement about society. Sure. His "statement" about society is that it's violent and sucks.

Heavy Traffic is, like many of Ralph Bakshi's films, a like it or hate it affair, but for those that respond to it, the film provides many a surprising attack on sensibility, decency, and what it means to get by in urban sprawl. It's almost too personal; one can see Bakshi or friends of his having gone through some of the little things in the lower ranks of New York City's daily life (particularly Brooklyn life) as depicted here. But it's this connection to a personal reality- and then a TOTAL adherence to turning this reality on its head and making it as wild, violent, and sexually deviant as possible- that is the key to the success of Bakshi's film, the best of his I've seen so far. His main character, Michael, is probably loosely based on himself; a young, would-be underground cartoonist who lives with insanely irate parents (Italian father and Jewish mother), and interacts with the neighborhood he's in with a casual attitude and a little reluctance to join in the mayhem that goes on with such kooky cats. Enter in Carole, a black bartender who won't take s*** from anyone, who teams up as a business partner, more or less, with Michael to first get cartoons off the ground, then, so it goes, misadventures in prostitution. It all leads up to an ending that isn't expected, though a sort of double-piling of shock and pleasant surprise.Heavy Traffic outlays Bakshi's outlook on life in a skill that could be called animated exploitation film-making. However, it's through this overloading of characters *meant* to be unattractive, sexually piggish, wretchedly racist (and, on the other side of the coin, sexist), and violent in the tradition of the Looney Tunes cartoons with the worst taste, that the film gets to the guts of the matter. It's a half-embrace, half-attack on a lack of values in a society, and as Baskhi relishes in his excess, he also is criticizing both himself for lapping it up and those in the neighborhood for being such eccentric mother-f***ers. And, as a satire should be, it's very funny, occasionally uproariously so. Scenes like Michael being pressured to get it on with the girl on the mattress on the roof, and the outcome as a sort of running gag; the scene with the song Mabeline playing, as Baskhi puts out drawings that are without much color, and look incredible for the reason that there's seemingly little effort put into the animation with the random over-the-top sexual positions; the little bits in the feuding with Michael's parents, the mother with her Jewish-star knife-holster and the father with his dedication to the "Godfather", who eats little people in his pasta, over anything really with his family; and when Michael presents "religious" cartoons to a dying old man, which to any prurient Christian taste is hilariously offensive and, well, cool.Bakshi is so personal at times, with his taste in color schemes, in over-lapping images with film clips, combining live-action and animation (usually with dancing ladies on one side and a lurid little twerp gawking on the other), and even likely real family photos from his own family laid in, that it levels going too far. There's a tendency for self-indulgence, however not always the bad kind, if that makes sense, and one can see how the film can and has been vehemently criticized for what it is really trying to criticize in the film. But deep down, past the creative madman in Bakshi, is also a heart; his film ends on a touching note, as abstraction turns real and a totally live scene reveals another level to Michael and Carol, as real outcasts who are both totally stubborn, and somehow meant for each other. Heavy Traffic is a one-of-a-kind affair, and the kind of under-the-radar act of an outrageous spectacle that it could only be done in the 70s. Grade: A-

A very gritty portrayal of city life. Heavy Traffic(not to be confused with the title of the animated film Heavy Metal) is a visual journey that contains plenty of sex and violence. It obviously isn't for all tastes. This is considered by many Ralph Bakshi's(Fritz the Cat) best work. The animation may seem a bit dated,but remember the movie was made in the early 70s, and had a pretty low budget. The only problem I had with the film was that it was too short,but despite this fact there is some good character exploration(but there could have been more with some of the secondary characters). The sound of the VHS copy I viewed seemed a bit off at times, but that's hardly a matter.

If you typically like Bakshi's movies, this may not be a good one to start off on, nor likely one to watch at all. It is missing the artistic beauty of American Pop and the comedy of Hey Good Lookin'. It is jammed pack with a confusing story about sleazy city dwellers.The movie combines live action and animation, though the majority of the film is animation. It opens with a scene at an arcade, and Mike, the main character (both in the live action and animated segments) is playing a pinball game. As situations arise in the film, we are constantly referred back to this pinball game in progress, thus being forced to find the connection between the two. There are a lot of different characters here that all impact one another, eventually becoming one story. Mike is a cartoonist. His father is involved with the mafia. His mother is a drunk who wants to kill his father. His friend is a transvestite. And, he eventually picks up a former hooker/bartender as a girlfriend, and together, they're going to figure out how to get enough cash to get the hell out of the city and move out to the West Coast. The story is confusing however, not only in the amount of characters you have to keep track of and their place in all of these interconnected events, but often, you are confronted with scenes without dialogue or some that don't seem to connect to the rest of the movie. Plus, there's a whole lot of people just looking to get laid, so there are a lot of naked cartoons running around, which is a bit frustrating when you're looking for more, not less, to help you figure out what the heck was going on half the time. Not to mention, once the cartoon story ends (consequently along with the pinball game), the live action story continues. Even though the fate of those live action characters were decided in the cartoon universe, it gets contradicted in what seemed like an unnecessary ending that also occurs in the live action universe. Bakshi cartoons are known for excellent animation, especially as you see it in American Pop, but Heavy Traffic, while fitting for it's day, doesn't have that same beautiful artistry as American Pop (even though there is about a twenty-five year difference between the release dates of the two films). I suppose, being one of Bakshi's earliest, it was more experimental than the later films. And it was one that I found difficult to appreciate.