For those who grew up in the inner cities - and by that, I mean the worst parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, to encompass the streets of Philadelphia, the segregated neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., and the over-crowded tenements of Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles - the pervasive violence, the lack of upward mobility, the profanity and discrimination, the sexist treatment of women, the drugs, prostitution, and out-and-out squalor and despair were an inescapable way of life. (If you don't believe me, check out the HBO series The Deuce.)
Add to these an irreverent outlook, a comically skewed yet perceptive observation of humanity with all its failings and faults; of basic "survival mode" amid the stench of decay and neglect, and you begin to understand what drove the art of a young Jewish immigrant growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn during the 1940s and 50s.
For artist and animator Ralph Bakshi, irreverence toward the status quo (with his middle finger prominently raised in direct response to it) was a natural form of self-expression, a method for combating the boredom and loneliness of line-drawing or cell-painting - and of perfecting his own off-kilter attitude to what we know nowadays as the politically incorrect.
Nothing in Bakshi's background, which manifested itself in his copious artwork, was commonplace or mundane. Quite the opposite: whether his characters were anthropomorphized animal figures or highly-caricatured examples of the human kind, for better or worse they lived and breathed the urban street life. They throbbed with vibrancy and authenticity - even if that so-termed authenticity verged on the exaggerated or the extreme.
In today's contentious atmosphere, an artist of Bakshi's ilk, and intensely polemical output and worldview, would be hailed as a visionary. His work would be broadcast on primetime cable (or pay-per-view channels) with the same loyalty and dedication that have made such programs as the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, HBO's Westworld, or the award-winning Netflix series The Handmaid's Tale the critical bonanzas they've become.
But back in the 1970s and 80s, when Bakshi first gained notice by depicting outright lust, loose sex, greed, corruption, violence, ugliness, and racial bigotry in full-length cartoon fashion ( Fritz the Cat, 1972; Heavy Traffic, 1973), he was looked upon with disdain if not outright revulsion as the architect of animated subversion. By capturing the stereotypical behavior of the racially mixed minorities he had grown up with, and by imposing his own personal (some would say "offensive") pulp style to animation, Bakshi revealed the true "colors," such as they were, of big-city life and the people who populate it.
Rotoscopy, or the process of tracing live-action models and settings from real-life individuals or photographs, became a workable (albeit crudely stylized) means of translating Bakshi's vision into actuality. The later introduction of computer graphics and CGI-animated features, however, only point up the fact that what Bakshi was doing at the time clearly pointed in that direction. He once complained, in an interview, that he was heavily criticized for using the rotoscopy method, which modern computer animation has taken full advantage of. His reaction: he excited by the knowledge that he was the path-breaker.
In the early days of his career, Bakshi toiled at Terrytoons and Hanna-Barbera, while later branching out with his own makeshift studio. He also worked, when work was indeed available, for such big-name outfits as Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century-Fox, but never with lavish budgets and always on the brink of ruination.
If the results remained stillborn or obviously rushed, their very crudity and inconclusiveness lent his features a degree of quaintness and immediacy - that is to say, of living in the moment.
Not a Second to SpareThis feeling of living in the moment was unlike anything one got from earlier animated films. The influence of New Hollywood, and the newfound freedom of expression and permissiveness that came with it, served as both a godsend and a curse to Sixties and Seventies filmmakers such as Bakshi.
Along with the animator, a new generation of cinematic entrepreneurs (i.e., Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, John Cassavetes, John Carpenter, Paul Schrader, and others) had come of age in the wake of this new open-mindedness. As a group, they succeeded in tearing open the motion-picture envelope of what could be seen and heard on the big screen.
Bakshi, as the only animator, was a key contributor to this idea of a more open cinema, the literal exposure of urban myths regarding our beloved American society - a cruel, dishonest, and demeaning one, from the point of view of the oppressed, which included such insalubrious characterizations of street hustlers, hookers, bums, vagrants, drug dealers, low-life types, pot-smokers, the police, innocent bystanders, the mob, college kids, and so on ( Fritz the Cat; Hey Good Lookin', 1982).
Ralph Bakshi's so-called genius, then, was in taking the side of the casual observer. His "camera lens" focused primarily on subject matter and theme, along with their accompanying surroundings - aspects that, in today's mixed-up crazy world, have endeared him to a whole new generation of fans.
His overall film work (yes, even the less characteristic sci-fi fantasy features) are a symbiotic blend of actual street sounds and competing voices, mixed together with whatever-was-available background footage, still images, and period music. The stunning visuals, many if not all of them individually and painstakingly traced from life, attest to the director, screenwriter, and animator's innate ability to make use of existing material.
He is not to be confused with the likes of an Ed Wood, who despite whatever outward enthusiasm he demonstrated in his amateurish film productions, could never be considered an artist. Bakshi was, and remains, an artist through and through.
Not that his on-the-fly working methods would be mistaken for professionally finished product. In stretching the limits between the real and the imaginary, Bakshi frequently struggled with budgets and lack of funding. More often than not, he failed, to a large extent, to bring his complete vision to fruition. Although less polished than the majority of his contemporaries' work, to this writer the less "finished" Bakshi's animation seemed the more revelatory they turned out to become. Indeed, their very imperfections proved more artful, more thrilling, and, yes, more truthful, for lack of a better word, than anything introduced by the Disney Studios.
Certainly the textures were all there: the sense of an incomplete masterpiece in the making; of more insights to come (or maybe not); the inescapable feeling of imbalance, of rawness and raunchiness, of disproportion, of sketchiness, of life out of balance, and what have you.
The copious bloodletting and perpetuation of ethnic and cultural stereotypes were there in spades (tongue planted firmly in cheek). Add to them the clash of different styles within the same picture frame and the incompatible combination of realistic drawings with cartoony creations - again, the intervention of real life into that of the make-believe film world.
This clash of styles would continue to be a hallmark of many of his productions, in particular that of Coonskin (1975) and the later Cool World (1992). Adult-oriented plots, defiantly for (and about) mature audiences, and the all-too-serious situations that abound in his films - these were the qualities that set Bakshi apart from every other animator of his period.
We need also mention the extraordinary use of Nazi propaganda films from pre-World War II Germany to entice rebellion and lift morale ( Wizards, 1977); the medieval storming of a rotoscoped castle, taken wholly from MGM's Ivanhoe ( The Lord of the Rings, 1978), and entire scenes lifted from director Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky ( Wizards again), or the tracing of Saruman from Charlton Heston's Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments ( Lord of the Rings). Were these blatant infringements of copyrighted material, or were they Bakshi's homage to films and filmmakers who came before him?
Pot smoking, sexual philandering, fornication, drug addiction, hustling: all levels of documented human behavior were explored, as unsavory and disrespectful as they appeared to be. All of these facets simply fascinated Bakshi, who depicts his characters as deeply flawed. But the empathy he displays for them shines through the muck nevertheless. No one is perfect, in his view, and no one is less flawed than anyone else. That is the lesson one learns when watching one of his pictures.
A true original and an unsung independent hero to writers and art directors alike, Bakshi's films are fascinating from the point of view of their uniqueness. His characters float in a surrealistic environment of his own formation, a hallucinatory topsy-turvy world as unseemly and disjointed as an LSD trip. Yet, there is something poetic to his work, the dialog (as coarse and vulgar as it can get) is no more shocking than, say, the harshest of David Mamet. His influences extend from cartoonists Max and Dave Fleischer to Walt Disney, from Walter Lantz, Bob Clampett, and Ollie Johnston to Tex Avery, Ub Iwerks, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Paul Terry, and underground comic book artists Robert Crumb, among others.
Bakshi's films remain as relevant in today's society as they ever were. For reasons already noted, we continue to face the same age-old problems of race, sexism, drug addiction, corruption, organized crime, gun violence, inequality, and such as many of his characters have faced - with an ever-increasing lack of faith in our institutions to control them. His films have proven especially popular with young adults, now coming of age at a perilous point in our history (and who ironically happen to see themselves depicted on screen); teenagers in love, kids in trouble leading aimless lives, and families feuding and arguing over who-knows-what.
Bakshi once stated that he came to the animation business at a time when animation was in its death throes. The art was dying, he said, and he may have been the one who led the charge in reviving it in the modern era.
Always a voracious reader, Bakshi wrote about the people he knew: the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the Italians, the Jews, and the other ethnicities in his vicinity. He had a fondness for their culture, and how different or alike they were from one another. Above all, he reveled in their individuality and distinctiveness, their abundant love of life, and most characteristically their music. He felt a responsibility to discuss these folks in his work, to talk about their lives, to capture their complexities in timeless of-the-era features that still resonate with film fans to this day.
In future installments of this series, we will be looking at each of his films individually and discuss their continued significance in and application for our times.
(End of Part One)
To be continued....
Copyright © 2018 by Josmar F. Lopes
