Here is my continuation of “The Important Animator Ralph Bakshi Part 1“.
After The Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi wanted to create another original film and approached Columbia Pictures to finance his next film. After securing the deal, Ralph set about making a film that would incorporate a large number of songs into a story that stretched across multiple generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Similar to The Lord of the Rings, American Pop used a lot of rotoscoping to create the animation although it also incorporated other techniques such as live-action and archival footage as well. The film was ultimately successful when it was released in 1981, doing well at the box office and being warmly received.
The production of Ralph Bakshi’s next film, “Hey Good Lookin'”, actually began after the production of Coonskin. The film was going to be very different to Ralph Bakshi’s previous works, having live-action and animated characters interacting with each other. The film was initially filmed in 1974 but ran into problems when it turned out that combining live-action and animated footage was actually more expensive than they had anticipated. Warner Bros., in addition to being concerned about the film’s quality, were hesitant to release the film after the controversy of Coonskin. Eventually, Ralph Bakshi was convinced to remove the live-action scenes from the film and to animate the rest of the film. Hey Good Lookin’ was eventually released in 1982 and, while being generally ignored by the American public, proved popular at the international box office and eventually developed a cult following.
Due to the success of sword and sorcery films such as Conan the Barbarian, Ralph decided to return to the fantasy genre for his next film. He negotiated a deal with 20th Century Fox to distribute the film and worked with Frank Frazetta, a legendary artist specialising in sci-fi and fantasy, to create the visual style of the movie. The film, again, used rotoscoping for its animation and saw many important individuals work on the film, notably Peter Chung who began his career working on Fire and Ice before working on many other important pieces of animation such as Æon Flux and Rugrats. However, the film was received indifferently by critics and performed poorly at the box office.
After the poor box office of Fire and Ice, Ralph Bakshi spent some time working on pitches, returning to TV animation and working on his painting. By 1990, Ralph wanted to return to making movies and pitched Cool World to Paramount Pictures as a horror film in which a cartoonist has sex with a cartoon woman, has a half-human half-cartoon child with her and the child, who resents him, follows him back to the real world to kill him. Paramount agreed to the pitch but secretly produced a new script which turned the film into a comedy film and reduced the age rating from R to PG-13. The new story was that a cartoonist named Jack, played by a live-action Gabriel Byrne, is serving time for killing a man who was found in bed with his wife and is sucked into a cartoon universe called Cool World where he is seduced by a cartoon character called Holli Would, voiced by Kim Basinger. Her plan is to use him to enter the real world and Jack must work with a live-action detective named Frank, played by Brad Pitt, to capture her. The film was received extremely negatively and bombed at the box office.
After the critical and box office disaster of Cool World, Ralph Bakshi went back to painting, eventually started teaching animation at the New York’s School of Visual Arts and worked on some more TV animation such as creating Spicy City for HBO as well as making a live-action TV film in 1994. He eventually began working on a new project, Last Days of Coney Island, which he turned to Kickstarter to produce. After a successful campaign, Ralph received enough money to begin creating an animated short. Last Days of Coney Island was released on Vimeo in 2015 before being released on YouTube nearly a year later.
While not as well-known as Walt Disney or Don Bluth, the impact that Ralph Bakshi has had on both the animation industry and the film industry should not be underestimated. Ralph was a pioneer of adult animation during a time period when the American animation industry was struggling and helped prove that there was demand for animated films that weren’t Disney. Let me know your thoughts on the important animator Ralph Bakshi, which films of his you’ve seen, which you’ve liked or disliked, his impact on animation as a whole and any additional information you might have on the topic.
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