All you have to do is want it.
As my 40th birthday bears down on me, I can take some solace in the notion that I'm in good company. For example, there's Ralph Bakshi's second feature, Heavy Traffic, which was released 40 years ago today. An idiosyncratic hybrid of live action and animation where the characters are frequently animated against still photos depicting New York City at its grimiest, with the occasional moving picture thrown in for variety's sake, Heavy Traffic is heavily autobiographical at the same time it's highly stylized. The main character, Michael (voiced by Joseph Kaufmann), is an aspiring underground cartoonist who's the product of a castrating Jewish mother (Terri Haven) and a mobbed-up Italian father (Frank DeKova) who provide him with what could charitably be called a colorful home life.
Apparently still a virgin at 22, Michael has few positive male role models to look up to when it comes to the treatment of the fairer sex. Apart from his father, who's chronically unfaithful to his mother, there's also his lecherous uncle, who offers him employment in the garment center, and the tough-guy types in the old movies he sees (specifically, 1932's Red Dust with Clark Gable). It's nothing short of miraculous, then, that the object of his affection, streetwise bartender Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson) quits her job in a fit of pique and impulsively accepts his offer of a place to stay. (Unlike his pointedly racist father, Michael has absolutely no hangups about the fact that she's black.) Smooth sailing isn't in the offing for them, though, since Carole's self-proclaimed protector Shorty, who gets around pretty well for having no legs, eventually comes gunning for Michael.
In between, Bakshi strings together a series of outrageous scenes and characters, including a masochistic transvestite named Snowflake, an overweight prostitute that Michael's father brings home for him, and the Godfather himself, who surrounds himself with hooded goons and proves to be curiously unkillable. Bakshi's also not above inserting his characters into Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and bringing them out for an encore in the live-action coda. As groundbreaking as it is, though, one's enjoyment of the film may be tempered somewhat by the strong language it traffics in, including the heavy use of a certain word that gets lobbed in Carole's direction with some frequency. Good thing she's the sort of character who gives as good as she gets.