GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Julia Arsenault (ja_kitty_71) Though, I usually watched family-oriented animated films; but I guess, I am like wholesome vs taboo. I first encountered Ralph Bakshi's films when I was a teenager; I don't know how old. I started with "The Lord of The Rings," then "Wizards;" that film became my favorite Bakshi film. And I watched on YouTube: "Fire & Ice," "Cool World" (live action/animated) and this film "Heavy Traffic." Well anyway, Heavy Traffic is a film which begins, ends, and occasionally combines with live-action, explores the often surreal fantasies of a young New York cartoonist named Michael Corleone, using pinball imagery as a metaphor for inner-city life. In the film, New York has a diseased, rotten, tough and violent atmosphere. Michael's Italian father, Angelo "Angie" Corleone, is a struggling mafioso who cheats on Michael's Jewish mother, Ida. The couple constantly bickers and try to kill each other. Unemployed, Michael dabbles with cartoons, artistically feeding off the grubbiness of his environment. He regularly hangs out at a local bar where he gets free drinks from the female black bartender, Carole, in exchange for the sketches from the somewhat annoying Shorty, Carole's violent, legless barfly devotee. One of the regular customers at the bar, Snowflake, a nymphomaniac transvestite, who gets beat up by a tough drunk who has only just realized that Snowflake is a man in drag and not a beautiful woman. Shorty throws the drunk out and the bar's white manager abusively confronts Carole over this and she quits. Shorty offers to let Carole stay at his place, but not wanting to get involved with him, Carole tells Shorty that she's staying with Michael, and that they've been "secretly tight for a long time." Michael is turned on by her no-nonsense attitude and strong sense of self-reliance. This relationship arouses his father's racist fury as well as the jealousy of Shorty. Michael moves out of his parents' house and tries to make a living, often failing. That's all I could tell you folks, you will have to see the film for yourself how it ends. I like Carole for her sassy, no-nonsense attitude. I love it how she told Michael off, after she tells Shorty about her and Michael.So overall, I enjoyed this film and also the film's soundtrack too, with the sounds of Chuck Berry ('Maybellene') and The Isley Brothers ('Twist & Shout').

Juha Hämäläinen Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic almost manages to beat his earlier 'Fritz the Cat' with its downbeat, very dark urban look and outrageous humor about different sides of life. It combines animation of different techniques and real-life footage with snippets of pop art, comics, advertisements and classic old movies. The result is simply a firework of a film. The main character Michael gets to know some hard facts of life while pin-balling between crazy home life and even crazier city life. The takes on sex, religion, race issues etc. may partly be a little dated in their early 70's ways but some deeper points and especially the humor still works in a timeless way. Bakshi's handling of the rather short but winding story and his technical ability to create memorable adult animation deserves repeated viewings in my eyes.

MisterWhiplash 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-

DarthBill No real plot, basically a collection of events from the life of an angry young Italian-Jewish man named Michael inter-spliced with him playing pinball in an arcade, the one bright spot in his life being a black hooker named Carole.This is one mean, nasty, disgusting little film that is so relentlessly bleak and uncompromising in telling the viewer that life is a hopeless Hell that it's unbearable, and the incredibly bad animation does not help. Did I mention that the characters are mostly unsympathetic? Some genuinely funny dark humor isn't enough to relieve the strain.While I applaud Ralph Bakshi's efforts & desire to use animation for adults and show it could be used for more than just entertaining kids, he really drops the ball with this one, allegedly his personal favorite. Hell, his Lord of the Rings and American Pop, flawed as they were, were better than this.