Mayhem, Madness Inhabit `Cool World'

XX "Cool World," with Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne and Brad Pitt. Directed by Ralph Bakshi. Uptown, Crossroads, Factoria, Kirkland, Alderwood Cinemas, Kent Cinema, Lewis & Clark, SeaTac North. "PG-13" - Parental guidance suggested; contains mature humor and subject matter. --------------------------------------------------------------- So, whaddaya think happens when an animated cartoon "doodle" named Holli Would (if she could) gets happily horizontal with the real live-action "noid" who created her? Well, for starters the lusty act turns Holli into a sizzlingly flesh-and-blood Kim Basinger - a transformation that holds radical consequences for Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), the comic-book artist who conjured Holli from his tormented imagination after being jailed for killing his wife's lover.

But y'see, doodles from Cool World aren't supposed to have sex with noids from the Real World. Cross that forbidden boundary and, well. . . you invite utter universal catastrophe by damaging the interworld matrix. Dig?

Not to mention crossing the boundary into absolute, unfettered and entirely deliberate insanity. "Cool World," the artistically impressive but painfully incoherent fantasy that brings these two worlds together, is like accidentally stumbling into a party where the music's too loud and everybody's wired to the same frantically blitzed wavelength.

Aside from that Doodle-Noid taboo, you can toss the rule book on this madness and clutch into auto-pilot for 101 minutes of Anything Goes.

For comic and animation buffs, this may be some kind of nirvana, like a blissful O.D. of "Ren and Stimpy" colliding with "Roger Rabbit," "Blade Runner" and enough cooing sighs from Basinger to stir-fry the hormones of any male with a pulse. She's Bardot, Monroe and her own sultry self all rolled into one shapely package, closer in teasing essence to supermodel Claudia Schiffer that the once-promising actress she used to be way back when.

Under the guidance of veteran animator Ralph Bakshi ("Fritz the Cat," "Lord of the Rings"), this adolescent fantasy fails to lay even its most basic ground rules: Crossover into Cool World from Real World is apparently the product of severe trauma, which is how detective Frank Harris ("Thelma and Louise's" thieving beefcake Brad Pitt) is pulled from 1945 Las Vegas to 1992 Cool World without aging.

Anvils fall, wacko characters are flattened, stretched, pummeled, bug-eyed, zapped, squeezed and slashed; every scene is bursting with this one-joke mayhem until you're forced to submit to the sheer senseless excess. Story? What story? Character development? Are you joking?

Bakshi's world is typically subversive, anti-nostalgic and, at times, a brilliantly conceived grafting of two and three dimensions. Unfortunately, its ingenuity matrix seems to have short-circuited.