 As with Fritz the Cat , Bakshi and Johnnie Vita took location photographs for the film 's backgrounds . Instead of tracing the photographs onto backgrounds , as they had done in Fritz the Cat , the film uses actual photographs and live @-@ action stock footage as backgrounds for much of the film . Bakshi and Vita were also experimental in their photography : Bakshi requested that the lab technicians produce several prints for every photo , each print increasingly out of focus , giving the backgrounds a fuzzy quality . Bakshi states that " We didn 't want to risk shooting [ out of focus ] on the spot . That could have meant making some expensive mistakes . " 
