AMOROUS ANIMATION: Fritz the Cat, Once Upon a Girl, Belladonna of Sadness

Fasten your seatbelts, cinephiles, because it’s SITC’s Season 1 Finale! Thanks to a few renegade, paintbrush-wielding perverts from New Hollywood’s anarchic yesteryear, you’re in for a full 411 on some of the most disturbing, disruptive, and innovative works of sketch-to-celluloid since Mickey Mouse first wet his wittle whistle in Steamboat Willie. As of this episode, your childhood nostalgia for Saturday morning cartoons is OVER.  Bored with the pretentious loftiness of his collegiate education, a privileged cat named Fritz acts like an ignorant a**hole who thinks he’s an anarchist in one of the most enduring masterworks of guerrilla satire, FRITZ THE CAT (1972). Don Jurwich, legendary heavyweight at Hanna-Barbera and Marvel Productions (this is not a joke), subverts your favorite fairy tales into gonzo softcore parables that will haunt you for the rest of your life (also not a joke) in the bombastic, cheeky ONCE UPON A GIRL (1976). A peasant woman’s quest for social and sexual freedom is manifested through tragedy, rupture, and rebirth in Eiichi Yamamoto’s kaleidoscopic, transcendent epic, BELLADONNA OF SADNESS (1973).