Fans of American animation all eventually have to reckon with the work of Ralph Bakshi. As someone raised on the animated fantasy worlds of Disney and Hanna Barbera, I avoided Bakshi's work for a very long time. The existence of his films, especially the early ones full of X-rated sexual imagery, plentiful vulgarity, and grotesque character designs, was something I initially wanted to write off as a fluke or deviation. However, Bakshi proved that adult animation could be financially successful, and was massively influential on the state of modern animation as we know it. He remains the most important example of an independent animator being able to make projects with a very personal, uncompromised artistic vision. And that vision was daring, subversive, and often in direct opposition to the prevailing tastes and norms of the artistic establishment.
One of the reasons I was so hesitant to explore Ralph Bakshi's work was the actual animation in his films. With a much smaller operation and more limited funds than what the established studios were working with, the quality of the animation was always extremely haphazard. You'd have incredible character designs, but in motion they were constantly off model. Shortcuts were employed regularly, such as live action backgrounds and rotoscoped characters. For a while, I latched on to the notion that rotoscoping - animation produced by tracing over live action footage - didn't count as real animation. I got over this idea eventually, because I learned that all the major animation studios use reference footage to some extent, and the use of rotoscoping can create a very distinct, interesting aesthetic if it's done well. And Ralph Bakshi understood how to do it well.
One of the reasons that Bakshi survived in animation for as long as he did and got as many films produced as he did was that he evolved with the times. He transitioned from his gritty "urban" films exploring city life to fantasy spectaculars like "Fire and Ice" and "The Lord of the Rings" in the 1980s, and helped kick off the television animation resurgence with "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" in 1988. One of the important early transitional titles was "American Pop," an almost entirely rotoscoped animated film that played as a straight drama, and contained very little of the X-rated material that characterized Bakshi's first few features. Instead of garish, oversexed caricatures, the film is about very down-to-earth human beings. The story is a series of vignettes about a Russian Jew named Zalmie who immigrates to America to escape the pogroms in 1905, and the four generations of descendants who follow him, all lovers of music in one way or another, with the last finally reaching pop stardom in the present day.
I suspect that "Heavy Traffic" is probably the best representation of Ralph Bakshi's artistic style and rebellious verve, and "Fritz the Cat" and "Coonskin" have the greatest historical importance for their boundary-breaking impact. However, "American Pop" is the only Ralph Bakshi film I truly love because I find the characters - a series of troubled, flawed men trying to find their way through different eras of American life - to be truly touching and relatable. There are episodes of tragedy, grief, humor, and triumph that are presented with a sympathy and humanism I don't see often in Bakshi's other work. "American Pop" feels like a very personal film, though Bakshi has claimed that the stories were based on the experiences of musician friends instead of his own life. And you simply cannot beat the soundtrack, which features Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas & the Papas, Peter Seger, Sam Cook, The Doors, and Pat Benatar.
The rotoscoped animation is stiff at times, but the visual storytelling is excellent, and the performances shine through the layers of abstraction. This style felt awkward for Bakshi's fantasy features like "The Lord of the Rings," but not in "American Pop," which is designed to be a family album of a kind, and incorporates mixed media and other artistic devices, like the prologue sequence in Russia being relayed in woodcuts. Historical events like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and WWII combat footage are recreated along with clips of the Nicholas Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, all rendered in the same rotoscoped visual style as the lives of our heroes, making them feel like they're part of one, heightened, slightly surreal animated continuity. I've never seen another film achieve something quite like this.
Watching every Ralph Bakshi film was difficult, because many of the films have significant shortcomings, or have not aged well, and even the best ones are rarely to my taste. However, the fact that they exist at all feels miraculous. That animated movies this uninhibited, this outrageous, and this iconoclastic found an audience is downright inspirational. And I can't think of anyone aside from Walt Disney whose work changed our understanding of what animation could and should be to such an extent, and left its mark on the industry forever.
What I've Seen - Ralph Bakshi
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Heavy Traffic (1973)
Coonskin (1975)
Wizards (1977)
The Lord of the Rings (1978)
American Pop (1981)
Hey Good Lookin' (1982)
Fire and Ice (1983)
Cool World (1992)
Cool and the Crazy (1994)
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