Heavy Traffic

Watch Heavy Traffic (1973) online on iFILM — Ralph Bakshi's follow-up to Fritz the Cat, mixing hand-drawn animation with live-action footage of 1970s New York in a way mainstream studios would not touch.

Michael is a broke, isolated cartoonist stuck in a cramped apartment between his loudmouth Italian father and his erratic mother. He drifts through the city's underground — pimps, gangsters, corrupt cops — and turns it all into comic strip material. Joseph Kaufmann voices Michael. Released with an X rating, the film holds up as an unfiltered document of New York's roughest years: adult animation that actually means it. Stream Heavy Traffic online on iFILM.