Ralph Bakshi — When Cartoons Aren’t Just for Kids
Back in the 1960s, a young animator from Brooklyn set out to make cartoons. What he created was not big-budget, apolitical, or child-friendly, and yet told great stories through great art, proving that cartoons didn’t have to be just for kids
An Unconventional Art-form
I’m a fan of cartoons. Growing up, I fed my imagination with a steady diet of the stuff, and I still do to this day. I like the stories, I like the plethora of art styles and character designs, and I like the enthusiasm it can kindle among fellow devotees.
As a concept, animation is an art form, and an extremely commercial one at that. In 2020, the 3D animation industry had an estimated worth of over $17 billion. The medium is dominated by titans such as Walt Disney Animation and Warner Brothers, which put millions of dollars into their projects — Disney’s “Frozen 2”, for instance, had a budget of over $150 000 000. With their vast financial and publicity resources, these companies can dictate the industry standard in terms of stories, characters, and art styles.
However, these juggernauts can be challenged, and among industry rebels, the name Ralph Bakshi resonates. His cartoons, with their hard-line drawing, multi-media cinematography, and unapologetic depiction of adult themes, made him famous (and infamous) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. But, not only did his movies rebel against the Disney establishment, they did so while doing well at the box office. But who was Ralph Bakshi, and how did he become the so-called “Bad Boy” of animation?
The Brownsville Kid
Ralph Bakshi was born to Jewish parents in Haifa, Palestine, on November 28, 1938. The next year, fearing the Arab League to the East and the rising Nazi threat in the West, the Bakshi family immigrated to the US. They settled down in Brownsville where Ralph’s father, Eliezar Bakshi, worked at a sheet-metal factory, while his mother Mina worked in the Garment District.
When asked about growing up in one of Brooklyn’s most crime-ridden neighbourhoods, Bakshi recalls a relatively happy upbringing. In Gibson and McDowell’s Unfiltered: the Complete Ralph Bakshi (Universe, 2008), Bakshi describes a childhood of playing baseball with his friends, entertaining his sister with hand-made puppet shows, and going on trips to Coney Island. As Bakshi put it: “I never felt poor a day in Brownsville, even though I was dirt poor.” There were, however, unsavoury elements to life in Brownsville. In an interview with John Culhane, Bakshi told of witnessing a mob-hit at age eight, and of dodging the local street-gangs.
Yet, despite the poverty and crime, Brownsville offered a vast array of artistic inspiration. The types of people, the streets, the buildings, the sounds, and even the detritus, all invoked a sense of variety, hardiness, and character, and how expressive roughness could be. This artistic stimuli, as well as the scenery of Brooklyn, would characterise Bakshi’s style as a cartoonist and filmmaker.
As a kid, Bakshi loved cartoons — he used to watch them at the local cinema or salvage them from trash cans. He never considered it as a career, however, until he came across, at the age of fifteen, Gene Byrne’s A Complete Guide to Cartooning (Grosset and Dunlap, 1950). Later, prompted by his high-school principal, Bakshi got into the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan. Here, Bakshi devoted himself entirely to the curriculum. In an interview with Michael Berrier, Bakshi said:
“I drew day and night, around the clock. I never hit the street any more. Guys used to come up and call for me, and I’d tell them to forget it. During my last two and a half years at Industrial Art, I lost thirty or forty pounds. I was working like a madman. My mother got very nervous. I wasn’t drawing that well; I just loved it. For the first time in my life, I was doing something — something I really enjoyed.”
It paid off, as Bakshi graduated with the school medal in cartooning in 1956.
The Terrytoon-years
Within a month of graduating, Bakshi — now eighteen years old — got his first job at Terrytoons. The company had been founded by Paul Terry in 1929. Throughout the company’s history, it had gained a reputation as the “bottom of the barrel” among animation studios, churning out fun but low-quality imitations of what Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera were putting out.
Bottom-tier though it was, Terrytoons would prove to be the perfect classroom for young Bakshi. Here, he got to work with veteran animators like Jim Tyer, Irv Spence, Martin Taras, and Tex Avery. These veterans taught Bakshi valuable lessons about the industry. For instance, Jim Tyer taught him that in animation, making the cartoons “move” was more important than making them “slick”. Terrytoons also allowed Bakshi to develop some of his ideas. After becoming a director at age 26, Bakshi pitched The Mighty Heroes, a satirical take on superheroes.
Despite its many benefits for a young artist, Terrytoons also taught Bakshi the realities of the business, and just how stifling it could be. As he told Berrier:
“Even if I had managed to be able to change the style and get the guys the way I wanted them, it still was unimportant to me. I don’t mind the fight if the fight has some meaning. But the thing we were geared for was television sales; in other words, CBS wanted me to break into television, and do good work for television, and try to improve the theatricals. But the subject matter. […] Even if I did a great Bugs Bunny, what did I have? Another great Bugs Bunny, and I still would probably enjoy the old ones better. That was the kind of funk I was in.”
After a brief stint as head of Paramount Pictures’ animation division in 1967 (it closed after three months), and after starting his own company, Bakshi Productions, and working on a few TV shows with producer Steven Krantz, Bakshi wanted to try something different. He wanted to do films, with plots and characters that spoke to him as an immigrant’s son from Brownsville, that drew on his interests and experiences, that flew in the face of the Disney status-quo.
And it began with a certain cartoon cat.
The “Bad Boy” of Animation
The three films which form Bakshi’s early career as a filmmaker — “Fritz the Cat”, “Heavy Traffic”, and “Coonskin” — are stories of urban decay, presented in what can only be described as animated collages.
“Fritz the Cat” (1972) follows the titular feline Fritz, a college student who — bored with academia — sets out to live life to the fullest. This leads to a three-part adventure involving bathtub orgies with college girls, a trip through Harlem ending in Fritz starting a race riot, and hanging out with sadistic, drug-addled, neo-nazi anarchists.
”Heavy Traffic” (1973) is about Michael Corleon, a fledgling cartoonist, and his meanderings through his rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighbourhood populated with lascivious photographers, dim street-hoodlums, legless bouncers, aggressive hookers, nymphomaniac transvestites, and demonic mobsters.
“Coonskin” (1974) tells the story — framed as a tale told in live-action by an aged Black prison escapee while waiting for the getaway car — of Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear and Preacher Fox, and their escapades in Harlem. Here, armed with their wits and no shortage of muscle and firepower, the three go toe-to-toe against false prophets, racist cops and decadent mafiosos in a quest to help their Black peers.
All three films had (by industry-standards) shoe-string budgets. “Fritz” had $700 000, “Traffic” $950 000, and “Coonskin” $1.6 million. These were low compared to Disney’s, “Robin Hood” (1973) had $5 million and “The Rescuers” (1977) had a budget of $7.5 million. One method was to skip pencil-tests, a process in which animators digitally capture rough pencil drawings to check how their animation is moving. To save time and money, Bakshi would flip through the animators’ drawings, timing them by hand before applying them to animation-cels.
For someone like Bakshi — used to the constraints of Terrytoons — tight budgets left room for creativity.
For backgrounds, Bakshi and Johnnie Vito would wander about New York, photographing streets and buildings which they would incorporate into the backgrounds. While working on “Fritz”, these were painted with water-colours, but in the subsequent pictures, they resorted to simple filters. In other instances, they used original archive footage, such as the vaudeville performance in the bar in “Traffic” or the steel-mill in “Coonskin”. The cartoon-characters would then be superimposed on these non-animated backgrounds. Bakshi even implemented the sounds and voices of the streets into his cartoons. Throughout all three films, Baskhi — armed with a Nagra tape-recorder — took up conversations with construction workers, barmen, family members, and recorded even street ambience. All of this would then be incorporated into the film. Most of these recordings range from grainy to downright inaudible, but nonetheless add to the sense of urban grit and decay that ooze through the films. Finally, there was the music. Baskshi, who had become enamoured with Jazz after finding a discarded Art Blakely album while working at Terrytoons, incorporated various songs into his first three films — such as “Bo Diddley”, Billy Holliday’s “Yesterday”, and “Take Five” (which Bakshi called his “good-luck song”). According to Bakshi, the rights to these songs could be purchased for as little as $50–100 a piece.
The result was films that, as Morgan Miller put it, became collages in motion. The characters and events transpire in a kind of broken reality, familiar and yet not uncanny. These are by no means slick, but they move, and allow for a wealth of expression.
However, Bakshi’s cartoons didn’t stand out just because of their rough style. Each film tries to tackle various adult themes. While there is sex, drugs, and violence, these are deployed to show certain realities. “Fritz” is a look at the hypocrisy of the 1960s, explored through the progressivism espoused by Fritz and his peers which in actuality does little to help their society. “Traffic” is a look at the strange and grim realities of Brooklyn, and how it can inspire art, but also a life of crime. Finally, “Coonskin” is about the facts of life and oppression in Harlem, doing so while satirically deploying a Minstrelsy-esque art-style. Despite all this, these aren’t pessimistic films, as all three end on relative high-notes. But their happy endings are not definitive nor conclusive, marking them out from the typical animation fare of the 70s. These aren’t fairy-tales, but neither are they tragedies.
Bakshi further added to his unorthodoxy through his hiring practice. In his book, Drawing the Line: the untold story of animation unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Kentucky, 2006), Tom Sito notes how Bakshi, when hiring animators, didn’t limit himself just to his old Terrytoons buddies, he also hired women and people of colour, such as Phil Mendez, Louis Scarborough, Lenord Robinson and Brenda Banks. He also paid his animators better — when most companies only paid an animator $500–800 dollars a week, Bakshi paid his artists $2000 a week. However, he was notoriously volatile. Phil Mendez recalls how Bakshi would fire an artist on Friday, then call them at home on Monday demanding to know why they hadn’t showed up for work. Sexual harassment was also common at Bakshi Productions. In an interview with Ariane Lange, Joanna Romersa, who worked for Bakshi as a secretary and production manager in the ’70s, said she “used to think Ralph was mad at me if he didn’t pat my butt or pinch my boob.”
Controversial though they were, two of the three films did quite well for themselves. “Fritz” made animation history both as the first X-rated animated film, and for becoming a box-office hit, grossing over $90,000,000 worldwide after its release in April 1973. “Fritz” proved that cartoons could contain adult themes and still make a profit. “Traffic”, meanwhile, was listed by Vincent Canby as one of the ten best films of 1973, and Michael Kasindorf hailed Bakshi as doing to animation “what Mick Jagger did for Rock’n’Roll.” “Coonskin”, however, overstepped itself.
Before its release in November 1975, “Coonskin” was picketed by the civil-rights group CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), on the grounds that it was an offensive depiction of Black people, while members of NAACP’s Hollywood chapter reported that “[they] thought the movie was very good. It’s not a putdown of Blacks. It is very positive.” Likewise, actors Charles Gordone and Philip Thomas stood by the film. In the end, the backlash was so tremendous that Paramount Pictures retracted the film within a week of its release. The dispute didn’t only affect Bakshi, whose next project, “Hey Good Lookin’” (1982), was shelved by 20th Century Fox indefinitely, but also the animators. In her “Coroner’s Inquiry into the Killing of Coonskin” (Village Voice 17th of August 1982), Carol Cooper notes how the controversy caused other studios to drop projects led by Black creatives, while the ten Black animators hired by Bakshi to work on “Lookin’” had to be laid off when the project was shelved.
Swords, Sorcery and Rotoscoping
After the Coonskin debacle, Bakshi decided to change tack. In an interview with Tasha Robinson, Bakshi stated that his four urban films — “Fritz”, “Traffic”, “Coonskin” and the aborted “Hey Good Lookin’” — were stories that appealed to him as a Brooklyn urbanite. However, he had grown up enjoying fantasy-focused Disney and Fleischer films, and had even pitched a fantasy-story, “Teewit”, while at Terrytoons. So here was his chance to try something different, and the result was “Wizards”.
Taking place millennia after a nuclear holocaust, “Wizards” (1977) revolves around the epic conflict between the wizard-brothers Avatar and Blackwolf. In his quest to conquer the elves and fairies who have repopulated the planet, Blackwolf unleashes his armies of mutants, deploying old-world weapons and technology, the greatest of which is a projector with reels of Nazi propaganda films. Avatar, with his companions the elf-warrior Weehawk, the fairy-in-training Elinore, and the robotic assassin-turned-guide Peace, set off for Blackwolf’s fortress to destroy his machine.
Production-wise, the movie was like any other Bakshi project: zero pencil tests, loose storyboarding, multimedia layouts (such as Michael Pluug’s stills). But it was unique in one regard: it was the first of Bakshi’s films to use rotoscoping. Invented by Max Fleischer in 1915, rotoscoping — in which a sequence of movements are filmed, then played back on tracing paper for animators to use — revolutionised animation, as it allowed for smoother, more natural-looking character motions. For Bakshi, who by the end of “Wizards’’ was running low on funds from 20th Century Fox (he was given $2,000,000), decided to employ rotoscoping as a cheap, but still artistic, means to film the final battle sequence, employing shots from films like “Alexander Nevsky” (1938), “The Battle of the Bulge” (1965) and “Zulu” (1964).
As a movie, “Wizards” is still very Bakshi-esque in terms of content as well as style. As Alexander Sergeant points out in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018), “Wizards” fits with Bakshi’s role as an animation iconoclast. With its rough style, grim subject-matter and multi-media cinematography, “Wizards” continued Bakshi’s ongoing protest against the slick and escapist Disney fantasy fare.
“Wizards” was a success, making $9.000.000 at the box-office. Popular belief has it that it might have made more if 20th Century Fox had not decided to hedge its bets on a little movie called “Star Wars” that came out that same year. All the same, now once more in the good books, Bakshi pressed on to another and far more ambitious fantasy project: “The Lord of the Rings” (1978).
After gaining the movie rights from United Artists in 1976 — who had acquired them from JRR Tolkien in 1968 — and after receiving the blessing from the Tolkien Estate, Bakshi got to work adapting the epic trilogy. In an interview with Jim Korkis, Bakshi said: “I wanted to bring another level to animation. I wanted to try to get away from the Wizards cartoon work. The goal was to bring as much quality as possible to the work. I wanted real illustration as opposed to cartoons.” This quality would be achieved by first having actors perform scenes on sets in Spain (it was cheaper than California), and would then be rotoscoped.
However, throughout the movie’s production, Bakshi fought continuously with the producers. For one thing, they refused to let him include “Part One” in the title, arguing that no one would go to see “only half a movie”. They also refused to give him more money and time, setting the project deadline for December. This forced Bakshi to speed up the story, racing through the events of The Two Towers. In his interview for John Grant’s Masters of Animation (New York, 2001), Bakshi concluded that the reason “Rings” flopped was a combination of the producers not believing in the project, and Bakshi being too enamoured with the source-material.
“Rings” would not be Bakshi’s last foray into fantasy, however. Five years later, he would collaborate with renowned fantasy artist Frank Frazetta to make “Fire & Ice” (1983). This Howardian epic, set in the years after the Ice Age, follows the war between the humans of Firekeep and the ice-queen Juliana, her son Necron and their cro-magnon followers. When Juliana kidnaps Princess Teegra of Firekeep, it’s up to the young, tribe-less warrior Larn to find her and, with the aid of the mysterious Darkwolf, defeat the forces of Ice.
“Fire and Ice” is a Frank Frazetta painting brought to life. The whirling spears, the loin-clothed barbarians, nubile women, and prehistoric landscape, all of it brought to life using rotoscoping. However, like many of Bakshi’s films, the animation is the film’s most redeeming quality, the story is downright predictable, and the characters flat. Still, as Bakshi’s last major film before “Cool World” (1992) — a movie he has essentially disowned — it was a decent final hurrah.
However, before we conclude this journey, it’s worth noting what could arguably be Bakshi’s greatest feature: “American Pop” (1981). The film follows a Russian-Jewish family from their flight from the motherland in the 1890s, and their generational struggle to make it as musicians in America, taking us, the audience, on a journey through musical Americana — from Vaudeville, to Jazz, to Rock’n’roll, to New Wave.
For Bakshi, an immigrant’s son, the story spoke not only to him but to the many other dreamers he had grown up with within Brownsville, who had fought tooth-and-nail (often with tragic results) to get to the top. As he told Mike Greco of Film Comment:
“The American Dream is realised in the freedom we have, not in the success we achieve. Success takes our lives. The struggle for success saps all our energies, and when you get it, what do you have? You have the pressure of remaining there, and you have the crushed bodies of friends and family who were sacrificed along the way. American Pop is about trying to make it in America.”
As a movie, “American Pop” has all the hallmarks of a Bakshi film — the rotoscoping, the original footage, the array of different art styles, the expressionism. It even has the Urbana — though compared to the bombasticness of “Heavy Traffic” and “Coonskin”, this is far more subdued and mature. But perhaps its greatest feature is the music — featuring songs by Janis Joplin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas & the Papas, Pat Benatar and Lynyrd Skynyrd to name a few. This music has the double effect of not only periodizing the various chapters of the story, but it also assists the narrative, serving better than what the movie’s limited — almost laconic — dialogue could manage.
If, as Morgan Miller observed, Bakshi’s works are collages studying generational conflicts, “American Pop” is probably the most significant expression of this. It is also his ultimate urban feature: an epic tale of rising from rags to riches, but not without having to climb a ladder made up of racism, exploitation, organised crime and substance abuse. Indeed, Little Pete, the one who makes it, is montaged as making a living selling cocaine until he gets a chance to show his skills before a producer. He has tamed the gritty Urbana, he’s on top of it, and it gives him what he needs to push for the final step.
After completing “American Pop” and “Fire & Ice”, and having seen “Hey Good Lookin’” finally hit the big screen in 1982, Bakshi was finished. He was tired of fighting with executives, and he was disillusioned by Hollywood. As he told the AV Club:
“Hollywood is no place to grow up, no place to live. It’s no place to have any friends, no place to enjoy life. It’s a disgusting, horrible, craze-driven town. It’s only how much do you make, or how fancy a car you have, that determines your status there. […] The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving Africa […] I mean, fuck ’em. I made a few bucks and got out. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with those people.”
When Cartoons aren’t just for kids
Bakshi now lives peacefully in Silver City, New Mexico, where he devotes his time to family, painting and selling his old animation cells — which can go for thousands of dollars apiece on Ebay. Back in Hollywood, his influence can be felt among various figures in animation and film, with figures such as Matt Groening, Quentin Tarantino, and Gore Vabrinski considering him a major influence on their work.
However, despite Bakshi’s distaste for the industry, he’s not pessimistic about the art-form. As far as Bakshi is concerned, there’s never been a better time to be an animator. As he told C. Edward of Cartoonbrews:
“The computer is the greatest single instrument that ever happened to an animator. The computer is such a magical thing. […] I’m calling for shadows under the characters feet, and I’m calling for different colored ink lines and having some machine ink it so fucking fast you can’t believe. I’m adding live-action; I’m doing all the things in my library with one editor that used to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in my studio. And I’m pencil testing everything I do for the first time in my life. I can’t tell you how stunning the whole situation is for animators. Let me say something, if Heavy Traffic cost a million dollars in its day, which it did, I could do Heavy Traffic today on the computer, for two hundred thousand dollars. The computer is god.”
Indeed, Bakshi even demonstrated this in 2015 with his first independent feature: “The Last Days of Coney Island”. This feature, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, was written, directed, animated, edited, and packaged by Bakshi — the music was done by jazz-artist Mark Taylor — and put out on Vimeo and Youtube.
Bakshi is also quite optimistic about the animation-medium. “[…] as more animators are laid off and the art becomes repetitive, there is going to be a lot of angry guys going solo.” So while he believes the medium is at a slump, this is only temporary. In fact, the bounce-back can be seen online, where various independent animators show a wide array of skills and techniques that go against the conventions of animation. There’s Harry Partridge, whose many cartoon shorts and ongoing Starbarians-series use clean lines with a combination of nerdy and bawdy humour. Max “Hotdiggedydemon” Gilardi, creator of such witty and spectacularly drawn shows like “Brain Dump”; there’s Cas Van De Pol, who makes cartoon reviews of various animated films and games, deploying a child-like yet incredibly expressive style that sets his channel apart; then there’s Vivienne “Vivziepop” Medrano, whose team are currently working on a animated musical set in hell, “Hazbin Hotel”. What these animators, and many more besides, have in common is that they are pushing the boundaries of animation — it doesn’t have to be clean, reverential or (in some cases) child-friendly, showing the various ways it can entertain the public, which in turn fund their projects. So, while Bakshi’s no longer in the director’s chair, his films proved the simple but lasting truth: that Cartoons do not have to be just for kids.
Further Reading:
Karl F. Cohen, Forbidden Animation: censored cartoons and blacklisted animators in America (McFarland & Company, 1997).
Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnel, Unfiltered: the Complete Ralph Bakshi (Universe, 2008).
John Grant, Masters of Animation (Watson-Guptill, 2001).
Christopher Holliday & Alexander Sergeant, Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018).
Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: the untold story of animation unions from Bosco to Bart Simpson (University of Kentucky Press, 2006).
