A Bakshi Film Fest!

When it came to Ralph Bakshi, I knew about Fritz the Cat and Wizards and Lord of the Rings and pretty much nothing else. 

Bakshi's follow-up to Fritz the Cat was Heavy Traffic. But I have to say sadly that I have never seen the complete film and so can only pass a limited judgement on its value. 

His third movie Coonskin is a remarkable movie in many ways, and I can see why someone would be offended by it. But I wasn't and I found this oddball movie which blends live action with some compelling animation to be hard to watch and hard to stop watching at the same time. It stars Scatman Crothers and Barry White (yeah...that Barry White).

The movie is nothing less than Uncle Remus meets Mario Puzo or to put it more bluntly Bre'r Rabbit meets The Godfather. It's ripe with violence and harsh language as we follow a trio of critters (Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear and Preacher Fox) who go to the big city and try to find success in arenas of organized crime. The movie is about loyalty and about the "American Dream". You know that last bit is true because the "American Dream" is literally in the movie in all her voluptuous red, white, blue and blonde glory.

It's a movie about Harlem and black culture but of course it's written and directed by Ralph Bakshi, a white Brooklyn Jew. Bakshi spent many of his critical youthful years in a black community and went to a black school back in the bad old days of segregation. (When America was "great" according to some modern bigots.) This movie felt more like a Spike Lee joint than any film I've seen not by Spike Lee. Whatever you think of it ultimately, it's a fascinating watch and I recommend to the stout of heart.

Hey Good Lookin' was originally made in 1973-1975 or thereabout but wasn't released until 1982 by Warner Brothers. It was a personal film Bakshi paid for and revised as he worked on other projects. The movie somewhat anticipates the wave of nostalgia for the 50's which engulfed pop culture with the advent of things like American Graffiti, Grease, and Happy Days. But these were romanticized and to no small degree sanitized remembrances of a time ruled by ethnic divisions, especially in so-called melting pots like New York City. The story is set in 1953 Brooklyn and our main character of interest is Vinnie, the preening leader of a gang dubbed "The Stompers". We follow Vinnie and his sidekick Crazy Shapiro (the son of a cop). 

There is a burgeoning love affair between Vinnie and a girl named Rozzie who is just coming out of the shadow of her Jewish parents. We follow these three and several other characters as they get into trouble with local black gangs and try to have as much sex as possible. This is a very physical view of that bygone time, filled with an abundance of flesh (if not nudity) in the Bakshi style. There is less of the surreal quality that Bakshi brough to other projects, but there is some. In many ways this is the most normal story of all Bakshi's projects. 

I remember slightly when American Pop hit the market in 1981and I was not interested. I was focused on fantasy at the time and curious works of nostalgia need not apply to my attention. And likely if I'd seen it back in the day, I'd have appreciated it less than I did when I watched it for the first time a week ago. American Pop purports to tell some of the winding tale of American popular music through the lens of four generations of a single family. We follow them from Europe into the slums of New York and across the country all the while listening to parts of music which has entertained some of the masses all that time. Each generation presents us with an eager young man who seeks success in the music business whether that business is on the vaudeville stage or the rock music stage.

This is a show which appears to be done completely with rotoscope and that's not a problem for me. I know animation purists seem to regard rotoscope with disdain, but it was a technique from animation's earliest days and seems an elegant predecessor to the computer animation of our time which uses real life as the template. This movie is at times though a little too realistic, and I'd wish they push the abstraction developed over the movements just a smidge more here and there. The music though is amazing and makes this show work. There are some real surprises in this story of a music family which is mob adjacent. Crime is a part of the legacy here just as much as the music alas. I very much enjoyed it.

Cool World came out in 1992 and it's clear that the movie owes its origin to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the highly successful movie that blended live and cartoon action. But Bakshi had been doing this for years. This time though the discrete worlds were made distinctive. We follow a tragic WWII soldier named Jack (Brad Pitt) who has just returned home and is in an accident which sweeps him away to "Cool World" where cartoons live actual lives. We jump forward to 1992, the modern society where we encounter Jack Deeds (Gabriel Byrne), a cartoonist who thinks he made up Cool World. 

Jack is in romantic thrall to what he believes is his own creation a voluptuous cartoon named "Holli Would" (Kim Basinger). Holli has schemes of her own which turn out to threaten all reality. Jack has become a cop in Cool World and is bent on stopping her and Deeds. The animated creatures in the movie dubbed "Doodles" have that chaotic insanity inherent in most Bakshi projects but also seem to echo the wilder and somewhat more experimental animation of the 1930's. This is a wild one, but also clearly a project minus the distinctive anarchic voice Bakshi was eager to display in his other films. 

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