Bubble Bath (1980)

Image courtesy of mubi.com

Animator Ralph Bakshi spent the 70s and 80s as animation’s id to Disney’s fledgling superego, hitting theaters during the studio’s weakest creative stretch with raw, adult work Disney wouldn’t touch. Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated animated feature, kicked things off with raunchy countercultural satire, followed by the gritty urban grotesques of Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. He then pivoted to rotoscoped fantasy with Wizards and The Lord of the Rings, and later Fire and Ice, trading wholesome spectacle for grit, sex, violence, and social bite throughout.

Bubble Bath is not a Bakshi vehicle, but it feels heavily influenced by it. I also wanted to take up space in this review because I don’t have a ton to say about this messy film.

The flimsy plot follows Zsolt, a panicky shop-window decorator who gets cold feet on his wedding day and rushes to his fiancée’s friend Anna to call things off, only for the two of them to start falling for each other as farcical complications pile up. There are constantly shifting art styles, with characters rarely holding the same aesthetic for more than a few seconds,  mixing Art Deco, psychedelia, and jazz-age sensibilities into a wildly off-model, perpetually morphing visual experience set to a sung-and-spoken musical score. And it isn’t good.

Bubble Bath’s storytelling is clunky from the start, leaning on contrived farce - characters arriving and departing on cue, a man hiding in a frogman suit - rather than any earned momentum, and the paper-thin premise simply isn’t enough to sustain a feature. Its reach toward progressive commentary on relationships and middle-class conformity comes through mostly as monologues and musical asides that gesture at “anxiety” and “discontent” without ever sharpening into real satire, leaving the social critique feeling underdeveloped rather than provocative. And the constant visual mutation - characters melting, art styles flipping every few seconds, in-camera effects intruding on the frame - often reads as restlessness for its own sake, as though the film mistakes nonstop stylistic churn for surrealist depth rather than using it to actually mean something. The result is a movie so busy being strange that it never quite earns the weirdness it’s so eager to show off.

And that’s why I began with Bakshi. While he is a filmmaker that isn’t for everyone with sometimes crude imagery and wild animation style (myself included, which is likely why I didn't go for this), his films at least seem to have an idea behind them, whether it’s race relations or a send up of censors. Bubble Bath feels like it might be reaching for something, but it feels so far off the mark it falls flat.

2 out of 5 Stars