Like many people, I first became aware of the animator Ralph Bakshi through his version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” produced in 1978. It was a video my brother and I watched with my father, who had introduced us to Tolkien’s work, more than once as children. I was never a fan of the books, having once attempted to read “The Hobbit” at my father’s insistence and not making it more than 10 pages in before discarding it for one of the many old copies of Hit Parader scattered around my bedroom floor, so I only remember snippets of Bakshi’s film version, most of it creepy to a young child.
It was only later when my head was — cough, cough— expanded that I discovered Bakshi’s other work; his more adult work, so to speak, if you think of things like sex, drugs, and various unsaid expletives as adult. It’s certainly not mature in the most traditional sense of the term, deriving its influence from a portmanteau of counterculture commix, Borscht Belt comedy, and avant-garde animation (an underappreciated group of artists ranging from John and Faith Hubley to Robert Breer, who were showcased in a great show at the Museum of Art and Design in 2012), spliced together by a working-class and urban cynicism.
“Cool Worlds: The Animation of Ralph Bakshi,” a film series running at BAM May 9-20, will showcase the artist’s most profane and personal works, ranging from his earliest X-rated features to his nostalgic, and often biting, portraits of American culture. (Bakshi’s version of “Lord of the Rings” is notably absent from the program, a conscious choice it seems and one I don’t mind one bit.)
There are many things linking all the works in the program, but in the crudest way Bakshi’s work can be divided into two sections. The first includes the dirtier, narratively loose films (“Fritz the Cat,” “Heavy Traffic”), the second the more narratively focused and nostalgic films (“American Pop,” “Hey Good Lookin’”). Each of these films has a little of everything in them, and others (“Wizards,” “Coonskin”) fall into a space somewhere in-between and are harder to define.
While “Fritz the Cat,” based on the characters created by Robert Crumb (the artist ultimately disapproved of the film), was Bakshi’s first big commercial success — a cause celebre due to its being granted an X-rating — “Heavy Traffic” may be Bakshi’s first creative success, a diaristic voyage into the unknown, at times satirical and downright foul. The film stars a character named Michael Corelone (one of the many references to “The Godfather” throughout Bakshi’s work), an aspiring cartoonist with overbearing parents and a clear stand-in for Bakshi himself. The film is wild and feverish, at times moving from one scene to the next with little explanation of what’s happening, and it features an intriguing combination of live-action and animation. The animation style is more expressive than in “Fritz,” which mirrors the freeform structure of the film. (Speaking of freeform, the characters seem to have directly influenced Corky McCoy’s cover art for Miles Davis’s “On the Corner,” one of most wild and expressive jazz albums of all time.)
Of Bakshi’s later films — and beginning in the early ’80s, there began to be long, long gaps between his works — “American Pop” is the most successfully executed, using a combination of animation techniques including rotoscoping, which is essentially Bakshi and his team of artists drawing over filmed scenes. Something akin to a jukebox musical, “American Pop” hangs on a multi-generational narrative with a backbeat. But make no mistake, music is the main focus for Bakshi, and the sequences set to song — including a rollicking medley of rock songs at the end of the film — are some of the best and most eloquent of his career, with a real control of the color and chaos that is splashing across the screen.
“Cool World,” the Brad Pitt-starring 1992 film — a flop upon its release, the studio thinking they were getting another “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” — has proven to be Bakshi’s last feature film to date (he’s currently working on “Last Days of Coney Island,” funded through Kickstarter in 2013), and the animator has produced very little work since, while his influence has spread considerably. Cartoons like “Ren & Stimpy,” “South Park,” and even “The Simpsons” wouldn’t exist without Bakshi’s insight that animation on a popular level doesn’t need to be aimed at children. It could be a medium just as adept as film — maybe even more so — at capturing the imaginative possibilities of the moving image.
