Crumb (1994)

Crumb (1994) – Documentary that examines the life and work of underground cartoon legend R. Crumb

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

Robert Crumb (or R. Crumb as he commonly signed his work) may not be a name that jumps out at you.  If you were growing up in the mid-60’s through early 1970s then his work is certainly familiar to you.  The image shown here is his best-known and one he came to dislike because of the notoriety it brought him.  In characters like “Mr. Natural” and “Fritz the Cat”, Crumb created a unique visual style that is instantly familiar.  The core elements of that style came from the cartoonists experiments with LSD.  The enormous feet and exaggerated facial features are distinctive.  As are the women in Crumb cartoons.  The women are inevitably “full figured”, matching the artist’s personal taste.

It is the women in the cartoons that create the controversy that accompanies R. Crumb.  Especially in his early works, he has been lauded for creating female characters who are comfortable and confident as they are.  As the years passed, his critics began to note a misogynistic tone growing in his work.  Certainly, Robert Crumb’s artistic sexual aesthetic seems to have stopped developing at the level of an adolescent boy.  As with any great artist, he raises a variety of issues and concerns.  Artists that don’t are quickly forgotten.

R. Crumb is an odd and awkward human being and the movie matches its subject.  This was a personal project or director Zwigoff that took years to complete.  It’s less an examination of the man’s work (a topic that pretty clearly would not have interested the cartoonist) than it is an examination of the man himself in the years the movie was made.  Crumb came from a troubled family and bears the scars of it all.  One of the real appeals of his work was that it clearly spoke to those of us who felt odd and out of place.  It said there might be a place for us too.  At the very least there was a cartoonist who knew how we felt.

R. Crumb saw the world as we did, a strange and sometimes scary place that could offer moments of odd wonder.

Why I Liked It – Getting to know the man behind the cartoons I knew as a kid.

Why You Will Like It – Robert Crumb is a very interesting person actually.  Not what you will expect.

There is some nudity (both cartoon and actual) in the movie and the controversial nature of some of his work is also detailed.

Rating – *** 1/2 Worth A Look