Simon Thompson takes a deep dive into the career of pioneering animated filmmaker Ralph Bakshi…
This is only tangentially related to the topic at hand but I’m going to draw this parallel anyway; when the great American author Hubert Selby Jr died and a documentary was made about him and one of the talking heads being interviewed was asked what Selby’s place in the annals of American literature would be, he replied “ his absence from it”. Exactly the same principle can be applied to the career and achievements of Ralph Bakshi, an animation pioneer decades ahead of his time, whose drive to use the medium to depict challenging and explicit subjects that were, more often than not, aimed at adult audiences, irrevocably changed American animation.
Since the 1970s-80s, which is considered to be his heyday by critics and fans alike, Bakshi has become a forgotten figure despite his pioneering achievements. He hasn’t made a feature length film since 1992, and has found himself a pariah within Hollywood, a fate a filmmaker of his talent doesn’t deserve at all.
Ralph Bakshi was born in October 1938, in Haifa, which was then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, to a Jewish family. At the age of one, his family emigrated to the United States ending up in the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Brownsville, one of the city’s poorest and toughest areas, fascinated the young Bakshi as did the comic books he would dig through the local bins to find. In 1947 at the age of 8, Bakshi took a trip with his father and uncle to Washington DC. Staying in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of the city, a majority black neighbourhood, Bakshi was accepted by the local neighbourhood kids and felt completely at home socially. In an unfortunate twist of fate however, Bakshi’s experiences in Washington DC also taught him about the ugliness of prejudice.
Washington DC was a segregated city subject to various Jim Crow Laws that extended to its school system. Because Bakshi attended a school in Foggy Bottom with his mother’s permission as the nearest white school was many miles away from his home, a teacher at the school sought the principal’s advice, who in turn called the police. This was because the principal in question believed that if the DC residents caught wind of a white, Jewish student attending a black school the city would descend into a full scale riot, leading Bakshi to being removed from his class.
As Bakshi’s father began to experience constant anxiety attacks, they moved back to Brownsville where Bakshi would spend the rest of his formative years. Bakshi’s love of drawing began in his teens, when he found a copy of Gene Byrne’s Complete Guide To Cartooning in his local library. Bakshi stole a copy of the book, and soaked up every lesson from it that he possibly could, drawing pictures which both reflected his love of science fiction and fantasy but also his ambition to depict the environment where he lived in a realistic, gritty way.
Bakshi’s time in high school was marred by constant clashes with teachers and authority, with Bakshi himself describing this period in his life as “broads, mouthing off, and doodling”. After one too many detentions, the school principal, to his credit, realised that Bakshi wasn’t suited to being in a conventional high school at all, and put in a transfer recommendation to Manhattan’s School Of Industrial Art, a place which he believed would help him develop his considerable artistic talent.
Graduating at 18 in 1956, Bakshi began his steady rise within the animation industry from the very bottom of the ladder. His first job in animation was being a cel polisher for the studio TerryToons (home of Mighty Mouse amongst others) painstakingly removing all of the grit and dirt from animation cells. Production manager Frank Schudde saw Bakshi’s attention to detail, and his drive to complete such a thankless task and promoted him to the position of cel painter. With a new role at the studio, Bakshi began to make the higher ups aware of his talent and word spread quickly to the extent established figureheads at TerryToons such as Connie Rasinski who took it upon themselves to guide Bakshi’s artistry.
At the age of 21, Bakshi married his girlfriend Elaine, having a son with her named Mark who was born a year later. As Bakshi began to take on more and more professional responsibility, culminating in being promoted to an animation director by the time he was 25, his personal life began to become increasingly strained as Elaine found his long working hours and constantly being away from home tough to bear. Bakshi dealt with his personal life in the only way he knew how, via a comic strip titled Dum Dum And Dee Dee which he started as a way to cope with his troubled marriage. Eventually, his passion for animation would begin to turn sour as the young and rebellious Bakshi was finding the professional industry to be an archaic and stagnant place, recycling the same old cutesy ideas with the input of the director being next to nothing.
Bakshi’s first project where he had any real input was The Mighty Heroes, a superhero parody show commissioned after an on the spot pitch to CBS programming chief Fred Silverman. The Mighty Heroes was Bakshi’s first major project as a director after over a decade in the industry, and in retrospect it’s an early sign of his anarchic and irreverent sense of humour that is a major component of some of his most famous works.
As Bakshi’s power at TerryToons expanded, he recruited numerous comic book artists such as Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, and Jim Steranko to produce work for the company and established it as a new experimental hub within American animation that was unafraid to take creative risks that the likes of Hana Barbera or Warner Bros would not. After finding out that his position was only meant to be temporary and that Paramount (the studio TerryToons was a subsidiary of) was about to close its animation division, Bakshi rejected a severance package and decided to found his independent studio Bakshi Productions, which began operating out of the Garment District in Manhattan, where his mother had worked and that Bakshi himself had called “the worst neighbourhood in the world.”
Fully in control of the venture, Bakshi Productions paid its staff exponentially higher salaries than they would have received anywhere else, and provided groundbreaking opportunities for women and minorities to gain access to the animation industry. The first project the studio embarked on was taking over work on the 60s Spider-Man animated series, a work which has been praised by fans and animation scholars alike for keeping the surreal and kinetic qualities of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original comics intact.
Keeping the lights on via producing commercials for companies such as Coca Cola, Bakshi sought to produce original and more personal work than anything else that he had done previously. He began working on an original script titled Heavy Traffic (more on that later), a deeply personal project about his adolescence, but producer Steve Krantz told him that he was too inexperienced and the script itself was too explicit for anybody to pick up. Krantz advised Bakshi to make his first film an adaptation of something instead.
Browsing the East Side Bookstore in Manhattan, Bakshi happened on a copy of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Fritz The Cat comics. Immediately impressed by Crumb’s biting satire, no holds barred depictions of sex and drug use, and eye catching illustrations, Bakshi bought the book and showed it to Steve Krantz as soon as he could to pitch it as a movie. Krantz completely agreed with Bakshi about its cinematic potential and started pre-production.
Fritz The Cat (1972) chronicles the various misadventures of its eponymous protagonist a misanthropic, horny, hedonistic cat named Fritz. Absolutely no one is spared from Fritz’s (and by extension Crumb’s) sharp eye, and just about every single authority figure or social cause is mocked mercilessly.
Studying Crumb’s original artwork conscientiously to see how it could translate to animation, Bakshi’s attention to detail impressed Crumb in their first meeting brokered by Steve Krantz. A smooth start in their partnership would give way to something much rockier, as Crumb refused to sign the contract that Krantz had drawn up and began to play hardball during the negotiations. Eventually Crumb left the production, but his wife Dana had Power Of Attorney and she signed the contract which gave Bakshi and Krantz the film rights.
The second and even taller hurdle Bakshi had to vault was getting a studio to take on a completely explicit, X rated counter culture comic strip given that animation at this point was still stuck being labelled as a disposable medium aimed at children. Practically every studio going balked at Bakshi’s pitch, except for Warner Bros – who bought it and gave him an $850,000 budget to work with. After seeing some test footage, they wanted the sexual content to be toned down and for a celebrity voice cast to be hired. Realising that they were never going to see eye to eye Bakshi and Krantz left and found a new buyer in Cinemation Industries, a company which specialised in exploitation movies.
On a tight schedule and a small budget, Bakshi got around his financial and time constraints by shooting extensive test shots of New York City’s various neighbourhoods to avoid having to pay extra for more animation. These backgrounds were then radiographed into animation cells and with the addition of Ira Turek’s linework, skewed camera angles, and the use of watercolour backgrounds, gave Fritz The Cat its distinctive look.
As the first ever animated film to be rated X by the MPAA, Fritz The Cat became an underground sensation at its release, grossing a staggering $90 million from a $700,000 budget. Released around the same time as Melvin Van Peebles groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the two films chimed nicely with the attitudes and lack of censorship restrictions from a post Bonnie and Clyde American cinematic landscape. Fritz The Cat has come, rightfully, to be seen as a landmark against censorship in animation, and the first popular American animated movie to be aimed squarely at an adult audience.
Bakshi had now truly arrived in the industry, and was in a position to return to the previous script he had been working on, Heavy Traffic. One of Bakshi’s most intensely personal works, Heavy Traffic focuses on Michael (Joseph Kaufman), a young aspiring cartoonist from a working class Brooklyn neighbourhood. Due to the mundanity of his day to day life, as well as his constantly bickering parents, Michael retreats into the surreal worlds of his own drawings. Eventually Michael and his girlfriend Carol (Beverely Hope Atkinson) hatch a plan to make enough money to move to California.
Inspired by both his own personal experiences as well as Hubert Selby Jr’s novel Last Exit To Brooklyn, Bakshi sought to make a film which represented both his Jewishness and family life on screen. The protagonist Michael’s pinball hobby is a nod to Bakshi’s own, with pinball itself being used as a metaphor in the movie for how much of life comes down to chance.
Production would be anything but smooth, and through his filmmaking contemporaries and friends Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg, Bakshi realised he was being ripped off by Steve Krantz, the producer of Fritz The Cat. Wondering why he hadn’t been paid his director’s fee for his work on the film, Krantz replied “ because the picture didn’t make any money Ralph” and Bakshi smelt a rat immediately, given that Krantz had just bought himself a brand new mansion in California and a BMW.
Bakshi and Krantz’s dispute resulted in Bakshi’s firing from Heavy Traffic, with Krantz fielding calls from various animators such as the legendary Chuck Jones to take over the production. At the eleventh hour co-producer Samuel Arkoff (who was the principal investor) threatened to pull the budget unless Krantz re-hired Bakshi immediately. Bakshi resumed work on the movie, but Krantz did his level best to make the set as hostile as possible, constantly demanding last minute rewrites and scenes to maintain a sense of power over the shoot.
Mixing live action stock footage, paintings (e.g. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) and combining real backgrounds with animation, instead of simply tracing them over as he had done with Fritz The Cat, gave Heavy Traffic an unmistakeable look that sets it apart from much of its contemporaries.
Because of the success of Fritz The Cat many cinemas were happy to pick up Heavy Traffic for a distribution run despite its X rating, and although it didn’t quite produce the same barnstorming numbers its predecessor did, it was largely well received by critics such as Vincent Canby, who placed it on his top 10 films of 1973 list, and Gene Siskel, who gave it a three out of four rating. Alongside Bakshi’s debut Fritz The Cat, Heavy Traffic has come to be seen as a milestone for American animation, with noted animation historian Michael Barnier calling both films “ambitious” and praising Bakshi for pushing past, yet building upon the achievements of what had come before.
Bakshi’s follow up to Heavy Traffic, Coonskin (1975), would prove to be the most controversial movie of his career, which, given the fact that its Ralph Bakshi that we are talking about here, is really saying something. As the production cycle of Heavy Traffic was drawing to a close, Bakshi began work on a project then titled Harlem Nights, which would later become Coonskin. Although Fritz The Cat and Heavy Traffic were both box office successes, Bakshi felt that they were merely being seen as “dirty Disney movies” that were completely disposable instead of serious long lasting works of art.
For Bakshi, Coonskin was to be the movie that showed critics and audiences that he was a serious filmmaker with something to say. Taking his firsthand experience of racism as both an immigrant and a jew, Bakshi wanted to make a movie which attacked both racist iconography and prejudice as a whole. Deep in the back of his mind during production were his childhood experiences living in racially segregated Washington DC for a few months, and this above anything else is what gives the movie its distinct anger.
The plot of Coonskin is by and large a modern retelling/piss take of the Disney film Song Of The South, focusing on the exploits of its three anthropomorphised main characters, Brother Rabbit ( Phillip Michael Thomas), Brother Bear ( Barry White), and Preacher Fox (Charles Gordonne). The trio are uprooted from their home in the American South after the bank mortgages their house to a buyer who wants to turn it into a brothel and decide to head north to New York City where they encounter all kinds of con men, racist cops, and the mafia, as they scheme to make a name and a fortune for themselves in New York’s underworld.
Taking Hollywood’s ugly history of racist imagery and gleefully putting it under a microscope, Coonskin represents Bakshi’s attempt to satirise both the ugliness but also the stupidity of racial and sexual stereotyping. Black, Jewish, Italian, gay, and redneck stereotypes are all depicted throughout the movie but in a completely exaggerated manner adopted by Bakshi to show the audience the inherent ridiculousness of bigotry. Behind the scenes, Bakshi hired several black animators including Brenda Banks, one of the first black women to ever work as a professional animator and a number of graffiti artists, who Bakshi had met via research trips around New York, training them in transferring their talent to animation.
Although Bakshi employs much of the same visual techniques (e.g. rapid cuts, a mixture of live action stock footage and animation) for this movie as he did for Heavy Traffic, Coonskin has a much looser and more sketchy look to it than its predecessor, thanks to the graffiti artists he had hired.
Coonskin ignited a firestorm of protest at the time of its release in 1975 most notably from an organisation named CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality). With most of the membership not having seen the film itself and completely removing it from its intended context, CORE began to picket theatres which Bryanston (the distributor) had booked, and unfairly branded both the film and Bakshi himself as racist. Eventually the protests escalated to the extent that a screening in Times Square had to be evacuated due to a smoke bomb being thrown into the cinema showing it.
Despite CORE’s objections the film was positively received by the NAACP in contrast, who wrote a letter of support that rightfully described it as being “difficult satire” but not a racist work. Sadly the controversy was far too much for Paramount to handle, so it was given a limited distribution run and lazily marketed as a blaxploitation movie. Critically the movie found champions such as Roger Ebert, who in his review lambasted the film’s misleading marketing: “Coonskin is said by its director to be about blacks and for whites, and by its ads to be for blacks and against whites. Its title was originally intended to break through racial stereotypes by its bluntness, but now the ads say the hero and his pals are out “to get the Man to stop calling them coonskin.” The movie’s original distributor, Paramount, dropped it after pressure from black groups. Now it’s being sold by Bryanston as an attack on the system. […] Coonskin is provocative, original and deserves better than being sold as the very thing it’s not..”
The film received similarly positive reviews in The New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Amsterdam News but the damage had already been done. Thanks to the movie being re-released on video and DVD under various new titles such as Street Fight, it has garnered a cult classic status and a massive critical reappraisal that would have been unthinkable to Bakshi in the mid-1970s.
After the controversy around Coonskin began to die down Bakshi decided to move away from the urban settings that had defined his first three films into the realm of fantasy. Fantasy was something Bakshi had been passionate about since childhood, and had sketched numerous drawings of creatures and worlds beyond our imagination since he was a high school student. It was the drawings from this period of his life that he would return as a source of inspiration for his fourth film, Wizards (1977).
Wizards represented a personal challenge for Bakshi, as he wanted to make a “family picture” as he described it, but one that concerned itself with serious topics such as fascism, technology, and the military industrial complex. Wizards takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth two million years after a large scale nuclear war, where humanity has reverted to a Tolkienian agrarian society. When Blackwolf (Steve Gravers) a malicious wizard, discovers long lost military technology and propaganda from the pre-apocalypse, he claims the throne of his kingdom for himself as an absolutist dictator and assembles an army to conquer Earth. It’s up to another wizard, Blackwolf’s gentle and kind twin brother Avatar (Bob Holt) to stop Blackwolf at all costs, leading to Avatar being forced to use his magical powers in the pursuit of killing his own flesh and blood.
Behind the scenes Bakshi hired some of the best contemporary illustrators in fantasy art. First he recruited British artist Ian Miller, whose etched Gothic illustrations, alongside the work of Marvel regular Mike Ploog, were to be used for the backgrounds. As production continued, the costs began to steadily increase to the extent that Bakshi was constantly petitioning Fox President Alan Ladd Jr for both individual salary increases and an extra $50,000 to see the movie through to completion.
Due to severely limited financial resources the epic battle sequences were proving to be a nightmare for Bakshi to animate, so he came up with an ingenious solution named rotoscoping. Invented by Max Fliescher, rotoscoping can broadly be defined as a practice involving an animator tracing over live action footage to create realistic movement. Since Bakshi had absolutely no money for actors or a crew to film live action battles, he instead requested prints of films that had large scale battle sequences, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevesky and spliced together the images he needed. Using a large scale IBM photocopier, Bakshi successfully fed every single 35mm frame into the device to produce enlarged copies.
Grossing $9 million from a $2,000,000 budget despite limited distribution, Wizards was greeted with a largely lukewarm reception from critics at the time, but as is a theme with much of Bakshi’s work has developed a substantial cult following, culminating in both a tabletop game and celebrity fans such as Quentin Tarantino championing the film.
Having had one shot at making an epic fantasy with Wizards, Bakshi decided to challenge himself even more with his next effort, a large scale animated adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s epic The Lord Of The Rings saga. The rights to Tolkien’s novel trilogy had bounced around Hollywood for well over a decade, David Lean was attached to direct an adaptation starring The Beatles (yes, I’m not making that up), Stanley Kubrick at one point was rumoured to be launching his own version, until he deemed the novels “unfilmable”, and even Michelangelo Antonioni was linked with it for a short time. Eventually the rights ended up in the hands of director John Boorman who at the time was riding high from both Point Blank and Deliverance.
Bakshi’s involvement began in 1974, as a result of him flicking through an issue of Variety and learning that John Boorman’s script had been abandoned. Bakshi, a keen devotee of Tolkein’s work since the start of his career, jumped at the news sensing a pathway to his involvement. A series of protracted legal disputes between MGM and United Artists shortly followed, finally being resolved by an agreement that United Artists pay $8,000,000 to cover MGM’s debt, made possible through the financial backing of producer Saul Zanetz.
Bakshi’s vision for the movie was simple. He didn’t want to produce a cartoonish version of Tolkien’s works, and he wanted there to be three films so that as faithful an adaptation as possible could be made. To avoid the former he decided to shoot the entire movie in live action and then rotoscope the footage later, believing Boorman’s original plan for it to be entirely in live action would have ended up looking like a cheap Roger Corman film. Sadly, United Artists were only willing to let Ralph Bakshi have two films instead of three, which left him stuck condensing the first two books The Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers into one film, and then having the other be solely dedicated to the third and final book, The Return Of The King.
Behind the scenes, Lord Of The Rings was the most chaotic shoot Bakshi had been involved in. Everything that could go wrong did, from Bakshi having constant clashes with producers Saul Zalentz, many hours’ worth of live action footage being rendered unusable due to picking up telephone lines, helicopters, and cars in and around the location shoot in Spain, and to top it all off a near three hour rough cut which Bakshi had to spend extensive post production time whittling down to two hours and twelve minutes.
Released in 1978, Bakshi’s The Lord Of The Rings had a strong box office grossing $32,000,000 off a $4 million budget, but a mixed appraisal critically. Joseph Gelmis, writing in Newsday praised it for being a “visual experience unlike anything that other animated features are doing at the moment.”, but others such as David Denby criticised it for not having much appeal to people who weren’t familiar with the source material.
In the decades since the film has garnered a dedicated cult following (with two of the most prominent members being South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker who constantly homage music and scenes from the film in their show) and overall has come to be regarded as a decent attempt at putting Tolkien’s work on screen hampered by time and budget constraints. Without it the Peter Jackson trilogy wouldn’t have been possible, as it showed Jackson how Tolkien’s work could be adapted into a cinematic context.
As the 1970s became the 1980s, Bakshi wanted to return to the thematic ground and urban settings that he had explored with his first three films, before his shift to fantasy. With a quarter of a century’s worth of experience in animation by this point in his career, he funnelled everything he had learnt technically and thematically into American Pop (1981), which chronicles a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians named the Belinskys, starting in 1905 and ending all the way in what was then the present day, in the 1980s. The Belinsky’s varying degrees of success within the entertainment industry parallels both the social and musical history of America across the 20th century.
Using both his signature rotoscoping in conjunction with water colours, live action shots, and archive footage from various concert performances set to an ungodly expensive soundtrack featuring the likes of George Gershwin, Louis Prima, The Doors, Sam Cooke, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Herbie Hancock – American Pop is an audio/visual splendour bolstered by a real sense of heart. It is a film which pulls no punches emotionally, and carries itself with a quiet maturity that Bakshi only could have reached by this stage in his career.
Bakshi’s subsequent efforts were Hey Good Lookin’ (1982), a 1950s period piece set in Brooklyn, and Fire and Ice (1983), a fantasy epic that allowed him to work with famed fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta whose work Bakshi held in the highest regard. Neither of these films really represent Bakshi at his best, and although Fire and Ice has a pretty vocal following and spawned the career of Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung, it’s very much familiar territory retrodden in a much less interesting way.
The rest of the 1980s would be a barren period for Bakshi in terms of feature films. Due to a combination of diminishing box office returns, a resurgence in the attitude of various moneymen that animation was squarely a children’s medium, and Bakshi’s overall bad luck when it came to dragging potential movies out of development hell, he didn’t make a single feature for rest of the decade.
Attempts to film adaptations of novels as diverse as Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, The Fan Man, The Worm Ouroboros, Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books, and The Catcher In The Rye all frustratingly fell through at varying stages of development. In this period Bakshi produced a comic strip entitled JunkTown, worked on music videos, such as providing background animation for The Rolling Stones’s Harlem Shuffle cover music video, and returned back to where he started in TV, working on The New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse and an anthology mini series titled This Ain’t Bebop.
The New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse, in particular put his name back on the map after half a decade or so of relative exile. Unfortunately because of various ridiculous controversies about suggestive content in the show, it was cancelled after a 19 episode run. Its lasting influence, due to Bakshi’s push for higher quality animation and a relaxed working environment, influenced a new generation of auteurism in American animation from Bruce Timm’s work on Batman The Animated Series, to Ren And Stimpy, Animaniacs and The Powerpuff Girls.
With an acclaimed series on his hands Bakshi was invited to pitch a movie of his own choosing by Paramount. What Bakshi pitched them was an idea he had while still working on Mighty Mouse, Cool World, a story about a cartoonist in prison who publishes a successful underground comic strip. The twist is that his creation is a living, breathing world all of its own at the centre of which is his star femme fatale character Debbie Dallas. The cartoonist has sex with Debbie and in the process of which produces a half-human half cartoon hybrid child. The child grows up resenting his father for abandoning him, and decides to venture into reality to kill him as revenge.
According to Bakshi, Paramount bought his idea “within about ten seconds” and production was greenlit in November 1990. Things quickly turned south. First Paramount organised a secret re-write of Bakshi’s original script and handed it to him on the opening day of filming, leading to the first of many shouting matches between Bakshi and the film’s producer Frank Mancuso Jr. Before Bakshi could wriggle his way out of the oncoming mess, Paramount immediately threatened to sue him if he didn’t complete the production.
Tempers then flared over casting. To portray Debbie Dallas (renamed Holli Would in the script rewrite) and her creator, Bakshi wanted Drew Barrymore and Brad Pitt respectively. The problem for Paramount was that both Barrymore and Pitt weren’t box office draws at this point, and to keep Pitt involved Bakshi was forced to hire Kim Basinger for the role he intended for Drew Barrymore, and Gabriel Byrne was given the leading role as the cartoonist. Bakshi, not wanting to lose Brad Pitt, then created the character of Frank, a policeman living in Cool World, just to keep him on board.
The final nail in the coffin for Bakshi’s original plan was Frank Mancuso Jr’s insistence that Cool World obtain a PG-13 rating from the MPAA, which is why he commissioned the secret re-write in the first place. This was the point where Bakshi decided to let his team of animators have total freedom in whatever they produced as a way to stick it to Mancuso and the executives upstairs. Bakshi let them draw or add anything to their hearts content – even if it made no narrative sense at all, going as far as not even giving them a script to work with.
Released in summer 1992, the finished Cool World as interfered with by the studio was a structural mess. Critics such as Leonard Maltin found it to be an inferior miniaturisation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and audiences rejected it in their droves with its overall box office amounting to $14 million off a $28 million budget, thanks to awful word of mouth.
The experience on Cool World left Bakshi scarred by the movie business for life. Since 1992, this brilliant filmmaker hasn’t made a single feature, retreating back into television work with varying degrees of success and largely focusing on painting. Bakshi’s work, however, has found a new audience of internet raised cinephiles as a direct result of being widely available to watch online, creating a relatively sizeable resurgence of interest in his career. Sadly this hasn’t translated into any big studio backing for one last masterpiece, with director Gore Verbinski expressing his disappointment far better than I could; “What happened to the Ralph Bakshis of the world? We’re all sitting here talking family entertainment. Does animation have to be family entertainment? Audiences want something new; they just can’t articulate what.”
Even if Bakshi’s name isn’t widely known, his fingerprints are on every single piece of American animation that has come after his work because of his daring to break the mould. From adult orientated animated sitcoms such as The Simpsons, South Park, Futurama, and King Of The Hill to the auteur driven works of Pixar, to the works of independent animators such as Peter Chung, Genndy Tartakovsky, and Philip Gelatt, American animators owe everything to Bakshi’s ripping up the consensus of animation simply being child’s play.
What are your thoughts on Ralph Bakshi and his filmography? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Simon Thompson
