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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 3/11/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

Ralph Bakshi

Ugh...am I really going to do this? I guess I'm really going to do this.

I did not enjoy the feature film work of Ralph Bakshi. From Fritz the Cat to Cool and the Crazy, his Showtime movie in 1994, Bakshi showed little command of any filmmaking, storytelling, or animation tools. His best films were written by other people and made in an animation style designed to cover up his inability to animate himself or manage a team of animators. He's honestly a bad filmmaker and an even worse animator, and it rankles me when I hear him addressed as some sort of master. He's not. He's actually really bad.

However, since I went through his entire feature film body of work (even his final short film, "Last Days of Coney Island") I still came away with some thoughts. If you step away from his individual films and look at what he was trying to say, when he was trying to say it, and where he came from, I think there are some interesting throughlines to grasp onto and talk about. It requires sorting through the incoherent storytelling he was prone to, especially the films set in New York City and supposedly reflecting the real world most directly, while filtering out his incessantly puerile sense of humor that clashed horribly with the headier points he was trying to get across.

Born in Palestine in 1938, his family moved to New York the next year where he grew up. Born of a Krymchak Jewish family, he lived out his childhood in Brooklyn, in near constant contact with the black culture of the city. As a young Jewish boy, he learned to identify with, to a certain extent, black culture (most evident in Coonskin), a formation of attending an all-black school in an all-black neighborhood. His first jobs in animation were at Terrytoons where he kept a steady progression of increased responsibility until he was a director of shorts and television series episodes, culminating on work on shows like Spider-Man and Mighty Mouse. It was in 1969 that he broke off and formed his own company with the aim of making feature films. Convinced by independent producer Saul Zaentz to make a commercially aimed film rather than a personal one, he acquired the rights to R. Crumb's character Fritz the Cat, a film that took about three years to make and went on to make roughly $90 million at the box office. His career was secured, at least for a while.

New York through the 70s

I am not a New Yorker, and I've been to the city once. I definitely never went there in the 50s, 60s, or 70s. However, Ralph Bakshi's films Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, Hey Good Lookin', and American Pop are all set in the past and present (70s) of New York, reflecting what Bakshi had seen and was seeing in the city he called home. I imagine he's decidedly political and on the pretty far on the left side of the political spectrum, but it manifests in an interesting set of ways through these films.

The entire perspective Bakshi had of American was urban, specifically New York City. He was suffused in black culture, feeling himself to be a part of it while obviously not fitting in entirely, and you can see that in his urban films. Fritz spends time trying to hang out with crows, playing up his connection to the struggle (he also sparks a race riot that he runs away from). Michael in Heavy Traffic dates a black girl over the objection of his Italian-American father. Coonskin is a retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories in a contemporary New York setting, as told by a character escaping prison, and there's a white, female figure with skin colored like an American flag that regularly, in small vignettes disconnected from what one might call the central story, demeans and destroys minor black characters. Hey Good Lookin' features an Italian central character, Vinnie, whose Jewish best friend, Crazy Shapiro, shoots two black guys just because, and the race war that breaks out.

What's evident in all of these examples is a sense of brotherhood with black culture and individuals. The most potent example is Coonskin, a film all about the black experience in New York that people at the time criticized for being made by a Jewish filmmaker (among other things). Was it his story to tell? Whether it was or not...he didn't tell it well. It's a fractured, aimless story with inappropriate and ineffectual comedy while being intentionally grotesque to the point that it obfuscates its point (there's an Italian character that goes well beyond caricature and into what is probably just simply offensive). However, across these films, what I see is a man on the outside of a culture that he wants to be part of, that he sees as oppressed in the city he calls home, and no real understanding of how to get them out.

R. Crumb apparently hated Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, and it had a lot to do with how the film ends. Fritz leaves the city, ends up in the midst of a small, radical, terrorist cell, and in the face of the reckless violence that they lay down on anyone they feel like, including the innocent Hippo woman who's just along for the ride, Fritz rejects the violence and tries to undo the planting of a bomb at a power plant. He fails and gets blown up (he was supposed to die, but the producer wanted to keep the character alive for sequels because even the dirty fringes of Hollywood have always known a good franchise opportunity when they see one). What Crumb apparently hated was Fritz's rejection of violence against the capitalistic system, which he saw as a fascistic statement on Bakshi's part (I get the sense that R. Crumb was...a messed up individual). Race is obviously part of this equation, especially considering the earlier episodes of the film where Fritz makes it with a black woman (well, a crow), suddenly breaks it off, tries to incite a revolution of the black citizens of the city, and it ends in a riot and the US Air Force dropping bombs on the city. Yeah, this stuff is just random and designed to shock the squares in effect.

So, Bakshi bemoaned the state of the black man in the American city, wanted their elevation in American life, and yet he was suspicious of most people promising them salvation. In Coonskin, when Brother Rabbit gets to the city from the country, he and Brother Bear come upon a preacher who promises worldly salvation and utopia if people just give him money which he promises he'll use for the coming revolution, but he's just using the money to enrich himself.

What I gather from all of this is a young man looking out on a scary city that he thinks he commands, but the reality and weight of everything around him keeps hitting him in the face every time he reaches out to affect some kind of positive change. There's a common motif of trying to escape from the city as well, but it seems obvious that Bakshi, at last in his earlier years, knew almost nothing of life outside New York City specifically and big cities in general (he did spend some time in Toronto before he started his own company). He wanted to know, and I was reminded of Martin Scorsese talking about how, growing up in New York City, the only thing one saw of wide open spaces was the movies, specifically westerns.

Fantasy


Unlike Scorsese, Bakshi didn't see westerns as his escape, he saw fantasy. Some of his earliest drawing efforts in high school were of fantasy, and he held onto that impulse through his entire career. His first effort at full fantasy filmmaking was the 1977 Wizards followed by his adaptation of the first half of The Lord of the Rings the next year and the Frank Frazetta produced Fire and Ice in the early 80s. I suppose you can call Cool World fantasy as well, but that's more of a fantasy fulfillment for Bakshi and his desire to have sex with his female animated characters and less an effort to create high fantasy, which the other three were.

Wizards is the one of these three that he wrote himself, and it's the most incoherent narratively and obvious in terms of messaging. It probably also cuts closest to the bone of who Bakshi was as a storyteller. The story is about a pair of brother wizards, one good and one evil, that must come to one final confrontation after the evil brother discovers the ultimate weapon: Nazi propaganda films that he shows to his troops to make them effective killing machines. The objective of the good wizard's quest is to destroy the projector and bring peace forever to the earth that was blown up 2 million years ago by atomic weapons. It's exceedingly obvious what it's trying to do, and the whole technology vs. natural magic stuff ends up not really mattering since the good wizard shoots the bad wizard with a gun (the violence is surprisingly blunt and bloody for a "kids" movie). The basic images of the whole thing are so mixed up, like Bakshi honestly just didn't understand the meaning of what he was putting on screen. He needed a quick out, so just have Avatar shoot Blackwolf with a gun. Or maybe it's supposed to be ironic? Which undermines the who nature/machine conflict he himself put up.

He's best when he's working off of other people's scripts, and two of those are The Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice. I wouldn't call either of them good, but they have more cohesive narratives while suppressing a lot of his worst narrative instincts in other people's work while, also, relying heavily on rotoscoping, so the animation is, in general, better. The first two-thirds of The Lord of the Rings I would hazard to call outright good. It's too abbreviated for the large story it's trying to tell, but it manages it well enough. There's a desire to stick as closely to Tolkien's source novel as possible, a direct reaction to his reading of John Boorman's proposed scripts that is...it's bonkers. It's just really bonkers. At least Bakshi could seem to realize when he was dealing with strong source material that shouldn't be over-messed with. Fire and Ice is an original work with the hook of being visually based on the artwork of Frank Frazetta, but the script was written by a couple of Marvel comics mainstays, so it has an episodic feel to it that prevents a larger narrative from really forming (while showing the limits of the rotoscoping process, making it look more like a Saturday morning cartoon like Star Trek: The Animated Adventures than feature film work), but it's competent in a way that something like Wizards simply isn't.

Through all of that is the obvious desire of Bakshi's to find some kind of escape. Escape from life in New York. Escape from modernity. Escape from technology. Escape from his own life and reality.

Poppin' on Coney Island


Two final works have to get mentioned in a discussion of Bakshi. The first is his best film, American Pop. It's a multi-generational story of a family of Jewish immigrants to America who all pursue music to one degree or another from the 1910s through the late 1970s. There's a surprising sophistication to the work (it wasn't written by Bakshi, one should note, but by Ronni Kern) while using rotoscoping to tell the tale visually. It's most effective when telling the stories outside of Bakshi's own experience and time, though. The first two generations, the boy who becomes a vaudeville performer and later producer, and then the son who is a piano virtuoso who goes to war in WWII, are surprisingly tender. And then the story of Bakshi's generation comes, and it's his story all of a sudden, and the movie loses almost everything that makes it's first half so endearing. The characters go from hard working dreamers to a lazy lay about who offers nothing to the world, no talent, gets a Midwestern girl pregnant on a one-night stand, and somehow ends up writing songs for a singer like Janice Joplin, that the group ends up dropping like a hat when he goes on a bender, the group continuing on to succeed without him. It's a depressing look at Bakshi himself, if you assign that to the character, and the film ends with a drug-fueled montage of the last generation in New York city using his status as drug dealer to get a popular band to listen to his songs. It's an interesting end that could have used more time, but the point really is that the part that drags the film down is the part that's closest to Bakshi himself.

And then there's The Last Days of Coney Island, an independent, Kickstarter short film he made more than 20 years after his last feature film that is Bakshi without any commercial concerns, and it's an unwatchable mess. It is actively unpleasant, incoherent, and antagonistic while completely lost in the 60s, making me come away from the experience with the only conclusion I found possible: the 60s fried this man's brain, and it was never coming back. It explained a lot of what I had seen across his feature film work. You can watch it here on Bakshi's YouTube channel. I really wouldn't recommend it, though.

In Retrospect


Ralph Bakshi was a puerile, immature filmmaker who had very little talent but worked very hard to get his stuff made. When he heavily relied on other people narratively, he could almost get to goodness, but his worst impulses were almost always on display. However, most of his stuff is material that he wrote, and it's just a slog of bad, childish jokes, fake maturity, incoherent philosophy, a brimming amount of hatred, and a stunted worldview that never moved past 1967.

For those of you who know him for The Lord of the Rings, I might (MIGHT) suggest you check out American Pop and Fire and Ice. For the rest...it might just be best to forget him completely. There's a look into a fractured mind here that can be interesting from a distance, but you have to wade through a lot of muck to get there. I don't think it was worth it.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Scream VI

65

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Lord of the Rings (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "In fact, for about two-thirds of the film, I was thinking that Bakshi had made something outright good. It fell apart a bit by the end, but there's enough to recommend in the film to say that this is pretty easily his best film up to this point." [Personal Collection]

American Pop (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "This film is probably looked at best as a survey of American music over the course of about 70 years, but there's still an attempt at story to be dealt with." [Amazon Prime]

Hey Good Lookin' (Rating 1/4) Full Review "This movie is trash. It's not the incoherent and dull nadir that was Wizards, but it's close." [Library]

Fire and Ice (Rating 2/4) Full Review Is this good? Nope. Is it entertaining? Mildly. Bakshi has certainly made far worse, and the injection of Frazetta design does some mild good for his filmmaking results." [Amazon Prime]

Cool World (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It's incoherent, difficult to look at, and just kind of confusing. It is one of Bakshi's worst efforts." [Library]

The Life of Emile Zola (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I do think the film loses something by all but removing Dreyfus' Jewishness, but the tale of his plight and Zola's efforts to use his cultural power to fight for the beleaguered military officer, unfairly persecuted by his own leadership, is well-captured and handsomely staged." [Library]

Gone with the Wind (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Gone with the Wind is a grand adventure and melodrama, and it still entertains eighty years later." [Personal Collection]

The Best Years of Our Lives (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It really is a great film." [Amazon Prime]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 4/1, and it will cover the first quarter century of the Academy Awards for Best Picture.