This is another one of those instances where something came out in my childhood which caught my interest but I didn’t have the means of experiencing it. Then years later as a powerful adult with an internet connection and a jonesing to reclaim my childhood via expired media, I am suddenly reminded of its existence only to track it down and finally close the book on it, knowing once and for all that it’s shit. Thank you, Netflix.
Cool World is one of those movies that purposefully comes out around the same time as another movie with a similar premise but one is clearly better like Babe and Gordy or Armageddon and Deep Impact. This is Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. Actually, Cool World came out about four years later so I guess instead of being developed in tandem, it was just being a johnny-come-lately.
This is the story about a GI who comes home from World War II to his mom, the only person he has in the world. He wins a shiny new motorcycle in a poker game and takes his mom out for a spin. They get in a crash and she dies. And then right there on the scene he gets transported to Cool World, a more low brow and adult version of Toon Town. Why him? Why then and there? Because a cartoon professor did it. Why? Because reasons. Because reasons will likely be the only explanation to around 80% of your questions during the course of the movie.
Flash forward to the then present day 90’s where Jack sits in a prison cell, drawing characters from his hit comic book series, Cool World. Herein lies one of the main ignored issues. Cool World is established later as an alternate dimension that is independent of our reality and has existed since long before Jack was even born. In Cool World he’s actually recognized as “the guy that thinks he invented Cool World.” So if he’s never been there, never seen it, how did he create something with the same name, same look and same characters? How is it that when he draws Holli Would in his cell, it’s actually also Holli Would in Cool World and it comes alive and beckons him into the paper Take on Me video verbatim? Next he gets spirited away into Cool World. Then what? We don’t know. How did it happen? What did he do in there? How did he get back out later? This scene has no reason to exist. All it does is establish that humans can travel to Cool World… which was already established. This occurrence gets totally abandoned as we cut to something else and by the time we get back to Jack, he’s being released from prison.
Going back to present day Frank, he’s somehow working for the Cool World Police Department after deciding to stay there for about the last fifty years up to this point in time. He hasn’t aged at all. (No one ages there.) One of his usual calls he gets is to go cock block Holli Would, (the poor man’s Jessica Rabbit.) She keeps trying to get real guys to come to Cool World so that she can have sex with them. If a human fucks a doodle… Pfff, fuck-a-doodle-do… If they diddle a doodle- damn it. If a human has sex with a doodle, (there’s no way to say this with a straight face,) the doodle becomes real. Why? Because reasons. Why is it bad? Because reasons. They needed some kind of conflict so they pulled one out of their ass.
Holli wants to be human because I guess it feels better. But she doesn’t really stop to think about the implications like not being immortal and eternally beautiful. Though I never saw a single humanoid man doodle in her world and there's only one other humanoid girl so really what the hell’s the point in that lonely existence? Man doodle. Man doodle. I hate the term doodle in this movie. “Toon” is probably copyrighted though. The fact that doodles can turn real also begs the question what about all the shtty looking freaks that populate Cool World? How would it work for them? Why are you making me imagine a person having sex with this? Who would do that? How? What would that even look like as real after they presumably transformed?
Most of the cartoon voices in the movie don’t really sound like good cartoon voices. The characters that populate the world have a real spectrum of art styles going on. There are some that look like they’re from any old WB short, or a Little Orphan Annie or Mutz strip. There are people that look like they’re from Popeye and then there are people that look more or less anatomically correct and human-like in the style of Don Bluth. The world around them seems to flip flop between Burtonesque and Gigeresque which is a huge contrast to many of the extras. Why are there so many different styles clashing here? I really want the whole thing to look like a cohesive universe but it doesn’t. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toon Town was just one big collective place where all Cartoons ever made lived together so it made sense for everyone to look different. But this is a world not created by a bunch of different people (or anyone) so there should be some consistency in the same way the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends has a bunch of different weird creatures in it but they are all within the same art style.
Also, I like zoot suit wolves as much as the next guy but I think the maximum effectiveness of their presence in numbers is probably somewhere around three. Any more than that is diminishing returns.
All that being said, this looks awesome.
I also like the movie props that are semi cartoon and semi real in that they appear to be drawn but exist there on a two-dimensional plain like they’re on the side of a board
Another problem with Cool World, the world, is all of the contrived zaniness. The entire place is in complete anarchy. The movie will be having a scene and shit will be flying around in the background or doodles are clobbering each other the head with hammers and anvils in the foreground. This isn’t a place where characters live out their lives and you can write entertaining stories about it. This is just Wackyland. I realize it’s a cartoon world but they’re just going “Hey it’s a cartoon world! Look how cuhrayzee everything is! Woooooooo!
Why the hell is Frank the main character? I mean he had the potential to be but he just has little stake in the conflict. He’s trying to stop Holli but that doesn’t come off as all that interesting because they never explain why what she’s doing is bad. The only real motivation here is that toward the end Frank thinks she killed his partner. Jack, however does much better as the unwitting protagonist and antihero. His story is more interesting what with him being incarcerated, having a personal connection by being the comic book writer that thinks he invented Cool World, making the mistake of getting involved with a crazy cartoon lady and then rectifying his mistake at the end where he was blatantly made out to be the hero. But no, Frank has to be our story vehicle for some reason. It’s like having to watch Star Wars through the perspective of Chewbacca. Yeah, you could do it, you could even make it work but it still would have been much better the other way.
So Jack goes back to Cool World and has sex with Holli. She turns real and the two of them escape back into the ordinary world. (Jack lives in Vegas by the way.) When they appear in his house it’s accompanied with all manner of electric light shows. His two female next door neighbors come over to check on him and find that he’s apparently just hanging out in his house with his presumably new really weird girlfriend, Holli. I really feel like these two characters should have been introduced earlier in the movie. They’re obviously closish friends who care about Jack but because we’re just now learning about them, this seen and their reactions to what’s happening don’t have quite as much impact.
So, they go out on the town. Holli has little inhibitions or social grace. Back in Cool Worldshe liked singing and dancing so that’s what she does here. Before long, both he and she start exhibiting this weird phenomena where they begin to flicker in between doodle form and real form… which look nothing like them. Jack looks kind of like Wimpy from Popeye and Holli looks like… I don’t know, some stupid fucking clown. Needless to say they are a little dismayed by their collective identity crisis.
Holli runs off and just happens to come across the professor from earlier in the movie, now in the real world incognito. He tells her with some coercion that to fix the problem she has to merge the two worlds by unplugging a nexus point that happens to be at the top of a big neon billboard. Yeah, apparently there are just random nexus points or portals that lead from one world to the other scattered all over the place.
Frank comes back to the real world for the first time in fifty years to go after Holli. Now something else has to be addressed. The human world and everything in it is referred to in Cool World as “real.” So that implies that our world is used to justify Cool World by it’s own citizens as false, fake or secondary. In other words it has to be an imitation of something that already exists and is thus unnatural or manufactured. Otherwise any parallel dimension is just as “real” as any other. So this basically contradicts one of the few things they dared to actually explain. Which is it? Was Cool World created or not?
So anyway, Frank finds Holli and sees her odd blinking condition and then remarks “It’s happening.” What? What is happening? You didn’t explain what this shit was before and you aren’t doing it now. It might as well have never happened at all because you failed to give it meaning.
On the chase up to the sign, Holli knocks Frank off of the building and he hits the cement. Holli opens the nexus and a bunch of doodles from someone’s bad drug trip come spewing out all over the city like an alternate version of Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain segment. Jack transforms into a doodle super hero in the style of John K, and starts beating the shit out of everything, eventually fixing the nexus and restoring balance between the worlds. In the process he becomes trapped in some weird doodle limbo with Holli which is his dream and her nightmare.
Frank, who you write off as dead already, gets dragged by his unrequited love, (who wasn't worth mentioning up to this point,) back to Cool World where she actually watches him die. But that’s okay because they also forgot to mention that when you die in Cool World, you become a doodle and then I guess live forever. Because who gives a shit about things like exposition, foreshadowing and rules? If a conflict ever arises in your story, immediately resolve it with whatever you can make up on the spot. Or just forget it exists entirely. That’s always an option. This should have played out like the scene from American Horror Story where the girl gets hit by the car and her mom comes and frantically tries to drag her to the haunted house property before she dies so that she’ll be a ghost there. But in order to create a good scene like that, you have to ESTABLISH THE RULES BEFORE HAND. She acts like she knew this fact all along but conveniently forgot when it became important.
My final unanswered question is this: could he now cheat death by having sex with a human thereby turning back into a live human? I have to admit that as unclear and nonsensical as everything in this movie is, it sure does leave plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination.
