WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Irishchatter I felt that this movie was rather stupid than "an underrated gem" as some reviewer described it. There was no story in this at all, all you see is women sticking their boobs out, people taking drugs, men's pants going down and seeing their penises. What do they have in meaning? Absouletely nothing!Yeah I know the cartoonist is the lead character but, he ain't doing a good job really. I would definitely give this movie a 0/10 if I had the chance to do on here! It's lame, rubbish and just again, it has no meaning.

Julia Arsenault (ja_kitty_71) Though, I usually watched family-oriented animated films; but I guess, I am like wholesome vs taboo. I first encountered Ralph Bakshi's films when I was a teenager; I don't know how old. I started with "The Lord of The Rings," then "Wizards;" that film became my favorite Bakshi film. And I watched on YouTube: "Fire & Ice," "Cool World" (live action/animated) and this film "Heavy Traffic." Well anyway, Heavy Traffic is a film which begins, ends, and occasionally combines with live-action, explores the often surreal fantasies of a young New York cartoonist named Michael Corleone, using pinball imagery as a metaphor for inner-city life. In the film, New York has a diseased, rotten, tough and violent atmosphere. Michael's Italian father, Angelo "Angie" Corleone, is a struggling mafioso who cheats on Michael's Jewish mother, Ida. The couple constantly bickers and try to kill each other. Unemployed, Michael dabbles with cartoons, artistically feeding off the grubbiness of his environment. He regularly hangs out at a local bar where he gets free drinks from the female black bartender, Carole, in exchange for the sketches from the somewhat annoying Shorty, Carole's violent, legless barfly devotee. One of the regular customers at the bar, Snowflake, a nymphomaniac transvestite, who gets beat up by a tough drunk who has only just realized that Snowflake is a man in drag and not a beautiful woman. Shorty throws the drunk out and the bar's white manager abusively confronts Carole over this and she quits. Shorty offers to let Carole stay at his place, but not wanting to get involved with him, Carole tells Shorty that she's staying with Michael, and that they've been "secretly tight for a long time." Michael is turned on by her no-nonsense attitude and strong sense of self-reliance. This relationship arouses his father's racist fury as well as the jealousy of Shorty. Michael moves out of his parents' house and tries to make a living, often failing. That's all I could tell you folks, you will have to see the film for yourself how it ends. I like Carole for her sassy, no-nonsense attitude. I love it how she told Michael off, after she tells Shorty about her and Michael.So overall, I enjoyed this film and also the film's soundtrack too, with the sounds of Chuck Berry ('Maybellene') and The Isley Brothers ('Twist & Shout').

ShootingShark Michael is an underground artist in New York City who draws strips of the people he sees around him. He hooks up with the beautiful Carol, but she loses her job in a bar and so the two go searching for the high life.Bakshi's films are hard to find, but it's more than worth the effort. Outside of Japan, he's really the only director in the world who has managed to make adult-oriented animation features, and his films are completely unique. Heavy Traffic is his most personal and probably his best too - it sucks you into the seedy seventies world of NYC and doesn't let go. On one level it's a shocking freakshow, filled with hustlers, transsexuals, down-and-outs, hookers and thugs, but only if you're a bit of a prude. It's really just a slice-of-life series of observations; some satirical, some gross, some tragic and all rendered in a wild array of visual styles - traditional cell animation, live action, multiple composites, filters and negatives, pencil-tests (the Maybellene sequence), near-subliminal stills, real movie clips (the film Michael watches in the empty cinema is Red Dust, with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow), stock shots, what have you. If nothing else, it bombards the viewer with a myriad of dazzling visual techniques. The film has many influences (Vaughn Bode, Robert Crumb, a sudden mock-up shot of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks) but Bakshi's direction is unique and his fearless experimentation with cinematic style is both admirable and rewarding. He not only plays with animation, he plays with styles within animation, like the incredible bullet-in-the-head moment, or the whole Mother Pile / Wanda The Last sequence. If the film has a weakness, it's that it's a bit episodic - crazy New York nights - but it's so overloaded with wild ideas and freaky moments that it doesn't spoil the flow, but just contributes to the freewheeling anarchy. The voice cast are cool, notably Atkinson, and there's a fabulous score by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin, featuring a memorable soul-fuelled cover of the traditional ballad Scarborough Fair. An acquired taste, for sure, but a must for real fans of animation, and check out any of Bakshi's other films (particularly Wizards and Cool World).

DarthBill No real plot, basically a collection of events from the life of an angry young Italian-Jewish man named Michael inter-spliced with him playing pinball in an arcade, the one bright spot in his life being a black hooker named Carole.This is one mean, nasty, disgusting little film that is so relentlessly bleak and uncompromising in telling the viewer that life is a hopeless Hell that it's unbearable, and the incredibly bad animation does not help. Did I mention that the characters are mostly unsympathetic? Some genuinely funny dark humor isn't enough to relieve the strain.While I applaud Ralph Bakshi's efforts & desire to use animation for adults and show it could be used for more than just entertaining kids, he really drops the ball with this one, allegedly his personal favorite. Hell, his Lord of the Rings and American Pop, flawed as they were, were better than this.