Maverick cartoonist Ralph Bakshi (b. 1938) earned the first X-rating for an animated feature in his racy, overripe and beautifully drawn casting of R. Crumb’s eponymous feline as a sexually voracious Greenwich Village hippie devoted to drugs and freeform promiscuity. A cracked valentine to bohemian New York, Bakshi’s film was controversial not only for its explicit sexual content but also for its jaundiced view of the racial divide in the US and the naiveté of the liberal establishment.