gwax's rumblings

Ralph Bakshi is a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing American maker of ani­mated films. I expect rel­a­tively few of you have ever heard of Ralph Bakshi and almost as few have seen any of his works, which is why it is nec­es­sary that I bring Ralph and his works to your attention.

My first encounter with Ralph Bakshi came when, at a young age, I saw the box for his 1977 film Wizards at my local video rental loca­tion, Video Revolution, and thought that it looked phe­nom­e­nally cool (same image as the poster image to the right). For rea­sons I do not recall, I didn’t man­age to actu­ally watch Wizards until I was in high school and, let me tell you, it’s a pretty fan­tas­tic movie. Wizards is set in the far, far, post-post-apocalyptic future and tells the story of a war between two wiz­ard broth­ers, Avatar and Blackwolf of the land of good and evil respec­tively. If I recall cor­rectly, the war is pre­cip­i­tated by Blackwolf’s dis­cov­ery of ancient Nazi war pro­pa­ganda. The film does a fan­tas­tic job of alter­nat­ing between light, dark and flat out sur­real; I highly rec­om­mend it.

It wasn’t until just recently that, in decid­ing to hunt down a copy of Wizards, I learned the iden­tity of Ralph Bakshi. Being the obses­sive con­sumer of media that I am, I decided to see what else Ralph has done and, lo and behold, Ralph Bakshi was respon­si­ble for Cool World. Cool World was a rather odd mix of car­toons and live action that I am rather fond of in spite of the rather poor crit­i­cal acclaim that it gar­nered in its time; I must be a mem­ber of the cult for which it is a cult hit. Upon real­iz­ing that Ralph was respon­si­ble for Wizards and Cool World, it became nec­es­sary for me to track down his other works and what should turn out to be his sem­i­nal work? None other than the film ver­sion of Fritz the Cat. Fritz the Cat is note­wor­thy both as the first inde­pen­dent ani­mated film to gross more than $100 mil­lion in the box office and as the first X-rated ani­mated fea­ture film. R. Crumb did not like Bakshi’s take on Fritz the Cat and killed off the comic char­ac­ter in retal­i­a­tion but, by most accounts, R. Crumb is a whack-job and the film was great; I have obtained the film but have not yet had the chance to watch it so I must with­hold my per­sonal views for now.

Ralph Bakshi is one of the behe­moths of mid-20^th cen­tury ani­ma­tion, respon­si­ble for many things beyond the few that I have men­tioned, and I would be doing you a dis­ser­vice if I didn’t bring him to your atten­tion. Having done so, the dis­ser­vice of not watch­ing Bakshi’s works is now yours to remedy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under movies & tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.