The Ralph Bakshi thread: C/D, S/D, etc

Heavy Traffic and Coonskin are the only Bakshi films I've seen. They're both sloppy and juvenile and awful but oddly pretty fucking compelling. Heavy Traffic, which I just recently rewatched, has this hellishly scuzzy city atmosphere to it that I haven't really felt in anything else from that era. It reminds me of Mean Streets, but a coupla strata lower.

Want to see more.

LOVE Wizards and Heavy Traffic.

Bakshi talks about the Bode connection here: http://www.ralphbakshi.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3948

(Scroll down past the fanboy retards that don't see any connection in their styles...)

It reminds me of Mean Streets, but a coupla strata lower

finally got around to watching Heavy Traffic the other day and this is what I thought too. He tries a little too hard to get as much mileage as possible out of the shock value - gratuitous titty shots, casual mysogyny, "hey let's chop that guys nuts off with a meat-cleaver!" violence. Still... oddly compelling.

Yeah this guy's movies take a lot of PATIENCE but I still watch them. I guess he lives about 60-80 miles north of me in the New Mexico desert – he came and spoke at my university and I found out four days after the fact. :( Maybe he'll show up again someday.

Whoa – the peeps that worked on Wizards: surprisingly not a sausage party!

http://www.ralphbakshi.com/biography/images/6Wizcrew-350.jpg

Awww look at all the hippies.

Okay turns out it's 110 miles west of here. Why this matters to anyone else, I do not know.

Ralph Bakshi is awesome

Haha. I like how all the women are like front and center in that pic. I mean, I'm assuming it's for height reasons and getting everyone in the shot but still I can almost sense Bakshi's wheels turning: "Misogyny? BUT LOOK AT MY MANY FEMALE EMPLOYEES." Anyway, certainly wasn't the cadre of weasely looking dudes I was expecting.

Just watched the "Wizard of Animation" documentary on the Wizards DVD and it is truly funny, him talking about how he's going to show Disney how to make a REAL children's fantasy cartoon. You know, one with Nazis and fairy nipples and priests spanking each other with wooden boards. Bakshi's got a big head and he's crude and nuts, but I love 'em anyways.

Saw Fritz the Cat for the first time 2 years ago, and it really felt like an animated version of a Fugs album. Coonskin is really something you have to see for yourself, but the intro song by Scatman Crothers is probably the best part of the film.

I'm seeing Heavy Traffic soon, which I'm pretty excited about. I appreciate the pulp/exploitation nature of his early films; they benefit greatly from his trash movie-influenced animation style. He seems to be all about rotoscoping ever since Wizards but his early films heavily feature things like photographed backgrounds, live dialog, and dramatic sequences that add up to a very cinematic approach. It's still all pretty groundbreaking work, and I can't really think of anyone else like Bakshi.

Bakshi = bitter

"How do you curse, and what does it sound like?"

"what is the sound of one Jew cursing"

I would enjoy seeing him and Richard Williams in a bitching competition. Srsly wld have no idea who to bet on.

just got this for my birthday

it's amazing

Any book that can make Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings look like a competent piece of filmmaking has done its job well.

That is some feat! I should see if the library has this.

Actually his LOTR is not too bad, the voice acting is really the terrible thing about it. Fortunately the DVD has other audio tracks – I used to get stoned and watch it dubbed in French. The songs are still in English, though. I like the Rankin-Bass Hobbit & Return of the King better.

this thing is LOADED with beautiful artwork, stills, sketches etc. but the Lord of the Rings chapter is peculiarly bereft of anything from the actual film - I think there must have been some rights issues or something, because there's no lack of material on all the other features.

The first thing my library suggests in a catalog search for this book is Waltons DVDs!

Anyway, certainly wasn't the cadre of weasely looking dudes I was expecting.

fwiw the author's place Bakshi's egalitarian hiring practices front-and-center - pointing out that his Production Deesigner was gay, he hired tons of women/minorities, etc. Bakshi sez his motto was "if you could do the work, you got hired"

Oh man Shakey you are making me want to spend money I don't have. This book sounds really cool.

agree LOTR is a bit of mess but some of the animation in it is really fantastic, and the best sequences are undeniable (which is why Peter Jackson stole them). I have always wondered why this film was so dark and it turns out that the Spanish company that processed the film that was used for all the backgrounds intentionally burned the negatives to try to obscure all the modern day stuff (planes, lightpoles, etc.) that had been left in the footage. They thought it would reflect badly on them if such "bad" cinematography got out. They didn't understand that the footage was just going to be used as a reference/was going to be painted over and that that stuff would be removed in later stages.

I like the Rankin Bass adaptations too - the character design and voice talent are definitely superior for the most part - but the animation is so stiff.

Heavy Traffic, which I just recently rewatched, has this hellishly scuzzy city atmosphere to it that I haven't really felt in anything else from that era. It reminds me of Mean Streets, but a coupla strata lower.

Vincent Canby said that Means Streets and Heavy Traffic could have switched titles and lost nothing in the process, put both on his top 10 list for 1973

IMDB sez: In 2005, Ralph Bakshi stated in interviews that he along with hip-hop group Wu Tang Clan and producer Albert S. Ruddy planned on producing a sequel.

unfortunately, this is not mentioned in the book

one of the weirder things (well, I guess it is kinda self-evident, it just hadn't occurred to me) is learning that a bunch of the dialogue for his first run of "urban" films (Fritz, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin) was just street recordings of actual people talking. Like, Bakshi would take a tape recorder, go into the city and pigeonhole people (or groups of people) and ask them to talk about various topics, and then use those recordings for the film. kinda mind-boggling that anyone would "write" a film this way... great example is him going into a barbershop in Harlem and asking the guys there to talk about being black in America for "Coonskin".

I finally read that Bakshi book, and it's beautifully presented w/tons of great pictures, but it felt like it there were a lot of gaps in the narrative. The writing could have been fleshed out a lot more.

I really admire the strength of his vision, but not always the vision itself.

Is "American Pop" worth watching at all? Did they end up getting the rights to songs on VHS/DVD? Was really surprised to find he got the movie rights to over 40 songs for under $100,000 just based on being seen as a hip figure at the time (or so the book reasoned).

I can't believe Coonskin even got made, either. The stills and production designs from it – and the lyrics Bakshi wrote to this song are absolutely discombobulating to see because they read as the worst kind of amplified minstrel bullshit. He takes this tack of "it's satire and if you don't get it, you're one of the dumb ones." I guess I would have to see it to know if it's actually "satire" or not but that whole chapter just made my head melt.

One of the production drawings of a caricature of a black woman has written on the side:
STRUTTIN'
GOIN TO A PARTY
JIVASS
JUS
PLAIN
HAPPY
N*****R
Like, why do you think you get to talk like that?

wait you've never seen it?!? it's probably his best movie!

"Aw shucks, I wanna rape ya" lol

There must be some Poe's Law shit at work here w/Coonskin. I hate watching youtubes of movies but I guess that's the only way to see it.
I did like the pic of the fat reverends nudie dance sketched and the in-betweens all had little fig leaves over the peener because the lady in charge of drawing them was uncomfortable drawing dick.

I guess that's the only way to see it

?

I saw Coonskin on VHS back in the day, but didn't it eventually get a DVD release as Street Fight?

i'm very conflicted about that one btw; in terms of quality it's one of his better films but i still don't know if it is justified or "worth it" to be so extreme in its use of racial caricature in the message/story it's telling

(oh, just noticed that's a link. wow that just came out!)

and that's a re-release, it's been on DVD for at least a few years

Well, ok!

I think if you've seen a lot of blaxploitation films it fits right in with something like Sweet Sweetback. it's a pretty vicious movie. The sneering sarcasm in Scatman's delivery of the title song should tell you a lot about it's tone and where it's coming from.

also Krazy Kat cockroach

i haven't seen Sweet Sweetback, maybe i should. but yeah, Coonskin is very vicious, and i did like that intro

yeah the Herriman stuff in the book is the #1 reason I want to see it

Heavy Traffic on blu ray July 16!

Checking out Fire & Ice on Netflix out of sheer curiosity. Twenty minutes in and it's just so lousy. Even setting aside the gross awful cheesecake stuff, the plot is threadbare and in every scene you can just count the ways they're trying to pad things out in order to save money on animation. The slo-mo is obvious but I especially like how many shots start a second or two before anybody moves or does anything. Kills any chance of the thing feeling lively, but hey, those seconds add up, guys! I really want to cut him slack for offering some kind of alternative to Disney etc., but this is... not good.

yeah. hate to say it, but bakshi deserves more credit for what he attempted than what he actually did

Just scanned ahead - she never puts her clothes back on!

NYC retro, which one shd i attend? don't think ive even seen Fritz.

http://www.bam.org/film/2014/cool-worlds

Coonskin is his best but I don't think you'll like any of these tbh

in order, I'd rank them:

Coonskin
Wizards
Heavy Traffic
Fritz the Cat
Hey Good Lookin
Cool World <-- this one barely qualifies imho, the released film is almost completely different Bakshi's conception of it, and it was heavily meddled with/re-edited etc. iirc

I'd put Fire and Ice below Fritz the Cat, weird that that one is not included? It's kind of the most conventionally beautiful to look at thx to Frazetta

Lord of the Rings also missing, would rate that on a par with Wizards, it is v strange and dark

I like seeing pre-CG anim on a big screen, your top 3 are the ones i'd see if i had the time

man I would LOVE to see any of these on a big screen, that's never happened anywhere near me unfortunately. but yeah Coonskin is maybe my favorite blaxploitation movie, it is insane.

Were it not for the existence of Cool World, Bakshi is one of those film makers where even his unsuccessful films are kinda brilliant.

I take it you did not watch Spicy City

Nah. Is it more recent?

re: Cool World

Bakshi pitched Cool World to Paramount Pictures (where Bakshi had worked as the final head of the studio's animation division) as an animated horror film. The concept of the film involved a cartoon and human having sex and conceiving a hybrid child who visits the real world to murder the father who abandoned her..

As the sets were being built in Las Vegas, producer Frank Mancuso, Jr., son of Paramount president Frank Mancuso, Sr., had the screenplay rewritten in secret, and gave Bakshi a new screenplay by screenwriters Michael Grais and Mark Victor that "was barely the same". In interviews at the time of the film's release, Mancuso, Jr., who was best known for the Friday the 13th franchise, stated a desire to move away from horror films, and wanted to produce a film "about what happens when someone creates a world, becomes defined by it, and then can't escape [...] a film about being trapped by your own creation."[2] Bakshi remembers that he got into a fight with Mancuso, Jr. and "punched [him] in the mouth." Paramount threatened Bakshi with a lawsuit if he refused to complete the film. "I thought if I did the animation well, it would be worth it, but you know what? It wasn't worth it."

wow, i'd much rather have seen the original plot!

Spicy City was a short series on HBO he did a little time after Cool World, it was not his best work

I quite liked Heavy Traffic and its indulgence in bodily fluids and physical abuse.

Bakshi did 40 minutes of Q&A after flying in from New Mexico. ("I carry New York inside of me.") He's working on a final feature called Last Days of Coney Island. He identifies painters and illustrators as his primary inspirations ("I was never a film buff") tho he loved La Strada and John Ford. "I'm from a different generation; America has changed. Art is a joke."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ralphbakshi/last-days-of-coney-island-0

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ralphbakshi/last-days-of-coney-island-0

Oh man would love to hear him ramble in person. The best kind of old crank.

for some reason fire and ice is on Kanopy, the otherwise high-minded streaming service for you, the thinking person. i watched the whole thing a while back and it was just as bad as my first abortive netflix viewing indicated. real lowest-common-denominator fantasy schlock, like a slightly better-animated he-man episode padded out to feature-esque length (81 minutes) and with gratuitous cheesecake everywhere. terrible.

I remembered his Mighty Mouse cartoon fondly from my childhood and I'm working my way through the complete series DVD now and it's almost certainly the most unhinged thing to ever air on Saturday mornings. Yes, far more so than anything Sid or Marty ever whipped up. And it holds up amazingly well! Genuinely funny stuff.

This entire sequence, forever. Absolutely imprinted onto my brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GHpW9vyMl8

"Will you STOP using that preposterous speech impediment and start using the Queen's English?!"

You can rent Coonskin for $5 on Amazon. Heavy Traffic is not currently available.

Iirc, Kino was going to do a Blu of Heavy Traffic.

And it happened in 2013 with Shout Factory and is hella expensive now

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Heavy-Traffic-Blu-ray/69770/

wow that clip was uh something

So, By-the-Bywater, the Tolkien podcast I cohost, has gotten around to this:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/37

I seem to remember some manufactured cocaine scandal surrounding his Mighty Mouse remake.

I saw Wizards when it came out. It made at least as much of an impact on me as Heavy Metal did later--which is to say, a lot.

I watched a bunch of his films a couple of years ago. Possibly prompted by another film podcast covering his LOTR.
Interesting stuff that would probably be found a bit problematic these days. His coonskin and a couple of others especially.
BUt most of it was at least interesting and pretty inventive.

I'm also just remembering Cool World turning up on one of the Worst Films Ever or similar podcasts so wonder if that was the prompt too.

it is indeed bad

Re: Mighty Mouse, the ersatz 'cocaine' snorting that caused such a furor wasn't even the weirdest/most potentially offensive thing in that episode (which featured at the very least an interspecies marriage involving a human and a mouse). And now I'm watching an episode from the subsequent season (before the super-delayed furor, I believe) wherein Gandy Goose and Sourpuss are unambiguously showering together. Half of the content in this 35-year-old Saturday morning cartoon wouldn't make it to air today. I genuinely love it so.