Animation noir

Spicy City needs more cayenne

by Gary Susman

SPICY CITY. Created by Ralph Bakshi. Airs on HBO, Fridays at midnight, Sundays at 3 a.m., and Tuesdays at 11:30 p.m.

Ralph Bakshi's failures can be more interesting than other artists' successes. The veteran animator, often credited with (or blamed for) bringing adult content into animation, stuffs his work with grandly ambitious themes, though his execution is seldom as inspired as the ideas behind it.

That's the case with Spicy City, Bakshi's new animated series for HBO. It's a set of six half-hour cyberpunk noir tales. Bakshi has clearly kept up with William Gibson novels and Neil Gaiman comic books during his down time. (It's been five years since his last movie, the similarly noirish Cool World, and 10 years since his last foray into TV, his acclaimed Saturday-morning revamp of Mighty Mouse.)

HBO would seem to be an ideal home for Bakshi. Its first adult animated series, this spring's Spawn, was similarly grim, bloody, and comics-inspired. Moreover, other adult series on HBO (notably, Dream On) have reveled in cable's license to use profanity, female nudity, and raunchy comedy that leaves no Freudian stone unturned. So on Spicy City, as in previous Bakshi works, if there's an opportunity to swear, you'll hear swearing; if there's an excuse to expose a woman's breasts, they'll be exposed (cartoon nipples still being a novelty, even 25 years after Bakshi's film of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat, this will be a pretext for some critics to call the show "innovative"); and if a spaceship docking reminds you of a sexual act, it's surely meant to.

Like Crumb, Bakshi has long been accused of misogyny and racism. Don't expect Spicy City to put a brake on those criticisms: all the women are voluptuous sirens, and characters are caricatured in ways that emphasize their ethnicity or their handicaps. Some of the female characters do actively refuse to be sex objects (even while the animator's pencil is objectifying them), and it's also true that all the characters are caricatures -- the good guys are all built like boxers, with buzz cuts and broken noses, and the villains are uniformly greasy-haired or ponytailed. In a noir world of moral compromise, everyone has weaknesses or defects to be exploited or caricatured -- which allows Bakshi to be an equal-opportunity misanthropist.

Spicy City is also a near-future world where technology has divorced mind from body, via virtual reality, organ transplants, cloning, and genetic engineering. Human bodies are cumbersome, defective machines, and the healthy are vulnerable as sources of spare parts -- often harvested by force, manufactured through cloning, and sold on the black market. New, drug-resistant viruses are a constant threat. As these themes accrue over the course of the series, they imply a rich, overarching vision of a biomechanical nightmare future. But that vision remains frustratingly unrealized because of Bakshi's scattershot, quick-cut, impressionistic narrative style.

Spicy City is plagued with such execution problems, beginning with the unfortunate title, which suggests either a Cajun cooking show or a place where British pop stars hang out. The narrator is a raven-tressed nightclub owner named, uh, Raven (voiced sultrily by Michelle Phillips), whose framing commentary serves even less apparent purpose than that of the Crypt Keeper on HBO's Tales from the Crypt. (In the sixth episode, however, which was unavailable for preview, Raven at last becomes the central character in one of her stories.) The production design, like the story lines, aims for Blade Runner but looks more like The Jetsons.

The stories offer familiar sci-fi variations on already familiar noir plots. In the debut episode, a man and a woman fall in love in cyberspace and are pursued by the woman's jealous boyfriend. In another, a stratosphere-dwelling tycoon hires a detective to find a fugitive on the surface world.

The most original episode is the second, in which a musician's severed hands take on a homicidal life of their own. The Latin flavoring (from the conga music to the magical-realist take on the living hands) is a welcome genre twist, and the surrealism provides the animators with a sense of (sick) fun and possibility. Had Bakshi sustained this spirit throughout the series, he really would have created a spicy city.