Heavy Traffic is about New York, about violence, perhaps most of all about ugliness. Shorty, a frog-faced legless man, the Godfather slurping spaghetti through enormous lips, the skinny Jewish mamma, the fat prostitutes—all are ugly and either stupid or evil, or both. Even the two good-looking characters, Michael and his sexy black girlfriend Carol, finally turn violent, perhaps corrupted by all the ugliness around them. Ralph Bakshi, the film's writer and director, depicts women with particular loathing, even more than he did in Fritz. Those breasts that keep popping out of blouses are not sexy but disgusting, in much the same way that Kenneth Anger's Marilyn Monroe and the other women in Hollywood Babylon, that classic of softcore misogyny, are disgusting.

The visual devices of Traffic have been rightly praised. The combination of live and animated action, the color effects produced through negative printing and other laboratory...