Rat Fink

Ron Mann’s “Tales of the Rat Fink”, a paean to the custom-car designer Ed Roth, plays like a rambunctious merger of personal history and automobile pornography. Ogling fins and drooling over fenders, the movie traces the colorful history of the hot rod from speed machine to babe magnet and, finally, museum piece and collector’s item. Along the way we learn of Mr. Roth’s lucrative idea to paint hideous monsters — including the Rat Fink of the title — on children’s T-shirts, a sartorial trend that, in the 1960’s, had the added benefit of getting their wearers banned from school, thus giving them more time to play with Mr. Roth’s model car kits.

More instructive about the obsessions of teenage boys than the allure of steel and wheel, “Tales of the Rat Fink” punctuates Michael Roberts’s eyeball-searing animation with a haphazard selection of old newsreels, photographs and automobile ads. Lending their voices to the cars themselves — a trick Mr. Roth, who died in 2001, might have found a tad cutesy — is an appropriately eclectic bunch of celebrities, including Tom Wolfe (who celebrated Mr. Roth in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”) and Ann-Margret, while a strangely listless John Goodman serves as the voice of Mr. Roth. “Cars should have personality”, he tells us, in a tone that suggests he’s struggling to locate his own. Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, “Tales of the Rat Fink” will convince you that Mr. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth.