This endearingly offbeat cinematic oddity offers a cockeyed chronicle of man's evolution from primate to person through a series of both cartoon and live action vignettes with a specific emphasis on the courtship between college students Lee (likeable Johnny Crawford) and Cathy (an appealing portrayal by the ravishing Victoria Principal).

Writer/director Donald Driver relates the enjoyably inane story at a snappy pace as well as maintains an amiable goofy tone throughout. The funky old school hand-drawn animation, the cheerfully risque sense of merry irreverent humor, groovy music and songs by Jimmy Webb, and satiric potshots against war and the uptight establishment all add immensely to this movie's dippy 70's counterculture period charm. Crawford and Principal make for extremely charming leads, with nice supporting contributions from Dennis Olivieri as Lee's easygoing buddy Arnie, John Hillerman as a smarmy shrink, Norman Grabowski as a hard-nosed sargeant, and Frank Parker as a nerdy college professor. A cute little film.

Passable adaptation of the Desmond Morris novel that child/teen idol star Johnny Crawford would probably rather forget. Brings to light that burning question: why do so many former underage actors/actresses/singers, etc. try to shake their image by doffing their duds?

It's beyond me why this movie isn't better regarded, let alone hasn't been released to any home format (legally that is). Produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions--which, much as you might object to its trademark "bunny" objectifying of women--it takes the theses of Desmond Morris' pop-anthropology book and translates them into a series of pro-sex, but more importantly pro-tenderness and pro-humanism sketches.

Some are cleverly animated (in various styles),others acted out in terms that range from the satiric to the tragic. The non-cartoon segments are primarily acted out by an appealingly goofy, vulnerable if muscled-up (from his juvenile TV stardom days on "The Rifleman") Johnny Crawford, and pert young Victoria Principle. (Stills from her nude scenes here were much later exploited as bogus evidence of a past "softcore" career after she'd achieved fame in the TV series "Dallas.")

"The Naked Ape" is imagined in creative and narrative ways that would never happen again (at least with a generous budget) after the mid-70s. It's conventionally sexy/humorous on the surface. But the overriding message is that the sexes should respect one another, and that mankind's tilt toward warring, macho self-destruction is anything but "natural." It's a beautiful message, one that the film arrives at with an entirely appropriate weight of melancholy and anti-Establishment critique.

A lot of counterculture-relic features from this era have dated badly, but I think this movie--poorly appreciated in the first place--is still forward-thinking, and would earn a larger cult following (the existing one flows from "cut" early-80s TV broadcasts and bootleg videos) if it were released as a legitimate DVD. C'mon, Hugh...this was your baby once, why not let it take some long-delayed toddling steps toward the public?

(P.S.: Looking at this review a decade later, I noticed the only two other "user comments" are from one person who erroneously thinks the original book was a "novel," and the other from someone who obviously hasn't seen the movie at all. Yeesh.)