Heavy Traffic
Heavy Traffic is an full-length animated film by Ralph Bakshi, released in 1973. It seeks to reproduce some of the atmosphere from underground comics of the period in an animated film.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
This film predates American Pop and Heavy Metal by about a decade. It bears some thematic relationship to Bakshi's earlier film Fritz the Cat, which was released in 1972, based on a Robert Crumb character.
The protagonist is a young adult male from New York City, half Jewish, half Italian. Unemployed, he dabbles with cartoons, wanders through the seedy side of the city, and befriends a female bartender from Harlem. His dad, a struggling mafioso, puts a murder contract out on his son for "disgracing the family" by dating a black woman.
