1971: Derek Malcolm on Bertolucci's 'The Conformist'

Magnificent Malcontent: Ralph Bakshi

The fun also rises: Bakshi rocks the Hemingway look in deadly earnest

At  San Diego Comic Con in 2008, Ralph Bakshi sat on a panel discussing the hard times animators were up against. New technology and plummeting budgets had seen 'toon-jockies fall like anthropomorphic ninepins, and those that survived the cull were being treated like production line workers. Bakshi, who made the leap from studio animation on the likes of Deputy Dawg to the fuck-you blockbuster Fritz The Cat and the fuck-you satire Coonskin, might have been expected to have some sympathy for the beardy ink-shufflers in his audience hoping to learn how to put things right.

But his message was characteristically, enthusiastically bullish: “If I was young, I wouldn’t even get a job, I’d get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys, sit and eat crap for a year, we’d be millionaires the next year. You sit there crying about getting a job at Disney saying ‘oh, it’s all crumbling’. It’s not crumbling – you’re crumbling! You got these computers that can do the job for nothing and whaddaya do? You try to get a job with some asshole studio. If you guys sit there crying, I got no respect for you. I’m telling you, if you’re young and you can send your wife to work – go do it!”

Frodo and Gollum search out the Crack of Doom in Heavy Traffic

And Bakshi knows the score when it comes to going it alone – it’s been the foundation of his career and what he considers his downfall. His greatest works – Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and American Pop – followed from his decision to ditch a regular paycheque at Terry Toons and Paramount and let emotional honesty rule his filmmaking. His first independent film took Robert Crumb’s comic book Fritz The Cat as a starting point and created a rich visual and aural collage that both celebrated the late 60s counter-culture and lampooned its pretensions and growing dishonesty. The cute animals may have been familiar to audiences but it was the polar opposite of Disney, a corporation Bakshi loathed, and was the first animation to get an X rating. It made a mint at the box office and got the director access to the fat wallets of the studio suits. What Bakshi gave them over his next decade both sealed his fate in filmmaking and his reputation as one of the great inspirational malcontents not just of animation but of any film medium.

Despite Fritz's top notch screentest, Roeg eventually plumped for Mick Jagger

Heavy Traffic (1973) was a characteristically affectionate New York street story, blending Bakshi’s Brooklyn Jewish humour with Looney Toons violence and a Scorsese sensibility, while the follow-up Coonskin (1975) looked at racism and stereotyping in a calculatedly offensive style that even today is an uncomfortable watch. American Pop (1981), was a melancholy, rotoscoped saga of immigration told   through the music of four decades that foretold the end of a certain America on the cusp of the Reagan era. Aside from gleefully foul language and joyous sleaze, all shared a bravura technical style that merged live action backgrounds, photographic stills and animated characters ranging from the photorealistic to Tex Avery caricature.

American Pop: Bakshi hates rotoscope (apparently)

Technical innovations were secondary. “I hate rotoscope” Bakshi once declared, comparing the technique that he’s most associated with to being stalked by one of his ex-wives. Yet it’s his finessing of that technique for which he is best known, with his version of The Lord of The Rings (1978) using an antediluvian CGI that remains the basis of current computer animation. Looking at the shiny worlds of Pixar, echoes of Bakshi’s technique are barely evident but look at the recent Beowulf, in which Ray Winstone was transformed into Sean Bean, thus negating the need to hire Sean Bean, and there are rich similarities between that early, eerily half-animated Rings and the mix of live actors and CGI that’s currently being touted as the latest Saviour of Cinema™. In fact, Bakshi's Tolkien movie is an aberation in the great maverick’s career, a project that was close to his heart but fettered by numerous interests and which only appeared to offer the freedom to achieve his interior vision. The experience planted the seeds of disillusion. “It burnt me out,” he said later, “it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; to do two and a half  hours of animation in a year. It took more out of me then I got back.”

Bakshi catches up on reviews for The Lovely Bones

For Bakshi, film is about heart and soul, not the mechanics of the process, which may explain why some of his work looks as though it was knocked out between a whisky breakfast and elevenses on the goonpipe. But he brought a depth to cartoons that stemmed from wider literary influences, like Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn, Kerouac and William Burroughs and cinematic innovators like Eisenstein. He came of age in the East Village of the Sixties and, if the iconoclastic spirit of the time and place drove his creativity in the Seventies, it’s also the reason he hasn’t released a feature since 1992’s bowdlerised chump nugget Cool World: disappointment with the world lies too heavily with him.

Bakshi often gives the impression that it was the industry that tired him, that it was the corporate bullshit that burned him out. But on the rare occasions he’s spoken about his stop-start attempts to return to filmmaking with the The Last Days of Coney Island it’s clear his long hiatus has been influenced by America’s wider malaise.


His story is the disappointment and frustration of the counter culture writ large and it’s the loss of hope, freedom and moral purpose in America as much as petty studio politics that makes it impossible for him to return to the screen. Coney Island was to have been about a place where entertainment, joy and possibility flourished briefly before ending in ruin. The ‘last days’ of the title are those of America, an America Bakshi loved but which he considers lost. Today, Bakshi confines himself to paint and canvas and a return to cinema seems sadly unlikely. And yet the tough-talking, articulate artist remains as forthright as ever. Speaking just before the US presidential elections of 2008, he was unequivicoal on the state of his nation: “What we are now disgusts me. I’m trying to hold on to what we should be.”