Ralph Bakshi

• 1. Introduction

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  Ralph Bakshi was born on the 29th of October 1938 in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, into a Krymchak Jewish family, and by the time he was a teenager in Brooklyn he was digging through trash cans for comic books. That detail matters. It tells you something about where his films came from: not from Hollywood tradition, not from Disney's clean lines and cheerful morals, but from faded paint and wooden crates and the noise of street life in Brownsville. In 1972, Bakshi released Fritz the Cat, the first animated film to receive an X rating, and it became the most successful independent animated feature of all time. The questions worth sitting with are simpler than his biography might suggest: how does a cel polisher from Brooklyn become the person who cracks open American animation, and what does it cost him to stay there?

• 2. Brooklyn and Brownsville

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  Brownsville in the late 1940s shaped everything Bakshi would later put on screen. His family lived in a low-rent apartment, and in a 2009 interview he described walls repainted so many times the color had faded under a hundred years of snow and rain. He loved those faded surfaces. He built toys from the wooden crates in the pushcarts outside. He described having what he called "a great feeling with wood, cement, and nails."

  In the spring of 1947, his father and uncle traveled to Washington, D.C., in search of business opportunities, and the family followed them into the Black neighborhood of Foggy Bottom. Bakshi recalled going to Black movies, Black parties, attending school with Black friends. When he tried to enroll in the nearby Black school rather than travel several miles to the nearest white school, the police removed him from the classroom. Officials feared that white residents would riot if they learned a white, let alone Jewish, student was attending. His father was suffering from anxiety attacks at the same time. Within months, the family returned to Brownsville and rarely spoke of what had happened.

  At fifteen, Bakshi found Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide to Cartooning at the public library, took it, and worked through every lesson. He later attended Thomas Jefferson High School with little interest in academics before being transferred to Manhattan's School of Industrial Art, where African-American cartoonist Charles Allen taught him. In June 1956, Bakshi graduated with an award in cartooning, a credential that matched exactly what he had been training himself to do since he was a child reading salvaged comics on a Brooklyn street.

• 3. From Cel Polisher to Director

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  When Bakshi was eighteen, his friend Cosmo Anzilotti was hired by Terrytoons, and recommended Bakshi to the studio's production manager, Frank Schudde. Bakshi was hired as a cel polisher, commuting four hours each day to the studio in suburban New Rochelle. His job was to carefully remove dirt and dust from animation cels.

  After a few months, Schudde was surprised Bakshi was still showing up. He promoted him to cel painter. Bakshi's ambition quickly outpaced the job: he slipped ten cels he was supposed to work on into the to-do pile of a fellow painter named Leo Giuliani to give himself more time to practice animating. The deception was discovered two days later when Schudde called Bakshi in because the cels had been painted on the wrong side. When Bakshi blamed Giuliani, an argument among all three followed. Schudde eventually took Bakshi's side, and the rest of the studio became aware of what he was working toward.

  Mentor Connie Rasinski became a father figure to Bakshi, fighting union threats to keep him as a layout artist and giving him his first material to animate. At twenty-five, Bakshi was promoted to director. He was deeply dissatisfied with the role as Terrytoons defined it: "We didn't really 'direct' like you'd think. We were 'animation directors,' because the story department controlled the storyboards. We couldn't affect anything, but I still tried."

  The moment that changed everything came in 1966, when he pitched a superhero parody to CBS executives on the spot as daytime programming chief Fred Silverman was leaving the room. Bakshi described the characters of The Mighty Heroes in real time: Strong Man, Tornado Man, Rope Man, Cuckoo Man, and Diaper Man, who "fought evil wherever they could, and the villains were stupider than they were." CBS greenlit it. Rasinski died in 1965, however, and Bakshi had no creative control over the finished series. By 1967 he was gone from Terrytoons, heading to Paramount, where he would spend eight months before the animation division closed on the 1st of December 1967.

• 4. Fritz the Cat and the X Rating

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  Bakshi found Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat while browsing the East Side Book Store on St. Mark's Place. He bought the book, showed it to producer Steve Krantz, and then worked to prove he could draw in Crumb's style before arranging a meeting. Crumb lent Bakshi one of his sketchbooks for reference. Then things got complicated: Crumb refused to sign the contract Krantz drew up, artist Vaughn Bode warned Bakshi that Crumb was "slick," and after a week staying with Crumb and his wife Dana in San Francisco, Crumb left without signing. Two weeks later, Krantz told Bakshi he had acquired the film rights through Dana, who held Crumb's power of attorney. Crumb was hostile to the film from that point on.

  Warner Bros. bought the project with a promised budget of $850,000, then pulled out when Bakshi refused to tone down the sexual content or cast celebrities. Krantz eventually made a deal with Jerry Gross at Cinemation Industries, a distributor specializing in exploitation films. The budget was tight enough to exclude pencil tests. Bakshi tested animation by flipping an animator's drawings by hand. When a cameraman noticed the desert scene cels were too narrow and revealed the transparency, Bakshi painted a cactus to cover it. Ira Turek inked outlines of street photographs onto cels using a Rapidograph pen, giving backgrounds a stylized realism the medium had not seen before. Watercolor tones were influenced by Ashcan School painters George Luks and John French Sloan. Real street conversations replaced scripted dialogue.

  Fritz the Cat was released on the 12th of April 1972. The Motion Picture Association of America gave it an X rating; Cinemation advertised it as "90 minutes of violence, excitement, and SEX... he's X-rated and animated!" Variety called it "an amusing, diverting, handsomely executed poke at youthful attitudes." Film historian John Grant wrote that it was "the breakthrough movie that opened brand new vistas to the commercial animator in the United States." It became the most successful independent animated feature of all time. The same month the film was released, Bakshi's daughter, Victoria, was born.

• 5. Urban Dramas and Their Costs

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  By the time Fritz the Cat was released, Bakshi was a celebrity, but he felt his reputation rested entirely on having directed a dirty cartoon. He began writing poetry before each new production as a way to process his emotions. The first poem, "Street Arabs," preceded Heavy Traffic in 1972, a film he had been developing since before Fritz the Cat was finished.

  Heavy Traffic was backed by Samuel Z. Arkoff, who responded to Bakshi's pitch about a "tortured underground cartoonist." Halfway through production, Bakshi asked Krantz when he would be paid for Fritz the Cat. Krantz told him the picture had made no money. Bakshi found this hard to believe, given that Krantz had recently bought a new BMW and a mansion in Beverly Hills. Without a lawyer, Bakshi turned for advice to directors he had become friendly with, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

  His next film, Coonskin, was a direct attack on racist stereotypes and on what he saw as the hero worship of organized crime following The Godfather. The film cast Scatman Crothers, Philip Michael Thomas, Barry White, and Charles Gordone. Bakshi described the opening song's vocal structure as "an early version of rap." He hired several African-American animators, including Brenda Banks, the first African-American female animator in the industry. The Congress of Racial Equality delayed its release with protests calling the film racist. Richard Eder of The New York Times called it potentially Bakshi's masterpiece. Bakshi himself called it his best film.

• 6. Fantasy, Rotoscoping, and Tolkien

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  Wizards, released in 1977, began life as the rejected Tee-Witt pitch that Bakshi had been carrying since 1967, the day he got in a car accident on the way to CBS and met his future second wife, Liz, at the auto body shop. George Lucas requested Bakshi change the title from War Wizards to Wizards to avoid conflict with Star Wars; in exchange, Lucas allowed Mark Hamill time off from Star Wars to record a voice for the film. The battle sequences were completed through rotoscoping, using printed frames from films including Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. When Bakshi discovered that IBM had introduced an industrial-sized photocopier, he asked a technical expert if he could feed 35mm reels into it to produce enlarged copies. It worked at a penny per copy.

  The Lord of the Rings followed in 1978, funded by Saul Zaentz at an $8 million budget. Bakshi shot the entire live-action base footage in Spain; during a large shoot, union bosses called a lunch break, and Bakshi secretly filmed actors in Orc costumes walking toward the craft service table. Voice actor John Hurt performed Aragorn. Mick Jagger visited the studio for the chance to play a role. United Artists pressured Bakshi to release the film as a stand-alone, with no indication a second part would follow, against his objections. The film cost $4 million to produce and grossed $30.5 million. The studio refused to fund a sequel. It won the Golden Gryphon at the 1980 Giffoni Film Festival.

  American Pop, released on the 13th of February 1981, traced four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians, with the soundtrack including Janis Joplin, The Doors, George Gershwin, The Mamas and the Papas, Herbie Hancock, Lou Reed, and Louis Prima, all acquired for under $1 million. Vincent Canby wrote that he was amazed at how Bakshi turned animated characters into figures of real feeling. Due to music clearance issues, the film did not appear on home video until 1998.

• 7. Controversy, Television, and the Limits of Control

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  Bakshi's return to television came in April 1987 out of necessity. With his car packed to the windows, heading back to New York to his family, he had a meeting with Judy Price, head of CBS's Saturday morning block. She rejected his prepared pitches and asked what else he had. He told her he had the rights to Mighty Mouse. He did not, in fact, own those rights. While researching, he discovered that CBS had acquired the entire Terrytoons library in 1955 and forgotten about it. As Bakshi later put it, "I sold them a show they already owned, so they just gave me the rights for nothin'!"

  Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures premiered on the 19th of September 1987, with John Kricfalusi as supervising director. Bruce Timm and Andrew Stanton were among the artists. The series earned an Annie Award and was ranked in Time magazine's "Best of '87." Then, on the 6th of June 1988, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association alleged that a sequence showing Mighty Mouse sniffing the remains of a crushed flower depicted cocaine use. Bakshi responded: "You could pick a still out of Lady and the Tramp and get the same impression. Fritz the Cat wasn't pornography. It was social commentary. This all smacks of burning books and the Third Reich." CBS canceled the series following the controversy.

  Cool World, Bakshi's 1992 return to theatrical features after a nine-year break, was rewritten in secret by producer Frank Mancuso Jr. while the sets were being built in Las Vegas. The animators were never given a screenplay. Bakshi told them, "Do a scene that's funny, whatever you want to do!" To keep Brad Pitt in the cast, Bakshi had to replace his original choice, Drew Barrymore, with Kim Basinger. The film received poor reviews and was a box-office disappointment, closing Bakshi's run of theatrical features. His final television series, Spicy City, premiered in July 1997, one month before the debut of South Park, making it the first adults-only cartoon series. When HBO wanted to replace Bakshi's writing team, he refused, and the series was canceled.

• 8. Legacy and Later Work

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  After Spicy City was canceled, Bakshi returned to painting. In September 2002, he and Liz moved to New Mexico. In 2003, he co-founded the Bakshi School of Animation with his son Eddie and Jess Gorell. The same year he received the Maverick Tribute Award at the Cinequest Film Festival, and the Online Film Critics Society placed four of his films on their list of the top one hundred animated features of all time: Fritz the Cat, The Lord of the Rings, Coonskin, and Fire and Ice. The Museum of Modern Art added his films to its collection for preservation.

  In February 2013, Bakshi launched a Kickstarter campaign for Last Days of Coney Island, casting Matthew Modine after Modine found the campaign online as a longtime fan. The film was released on Vimeo in 2015 and made free on YouTube on the 13th of October 2016.

  The influence on animation proved durable. Rotoscoping techniques from The Lord of the Rings directly inspired the animator behind The Spine of Night. Director Gore Verbinski cited Bakshi when discussing his film Rango, asking publicly: "What happened to the Ralph Bakshis of the world? We're all sitting here talking family entertainment. Does animation have to be family entertainment?" In 2021, Bakshi received the Animafest Zagreb Lifetime Achievement Award. His entire theatrical filmography was screened at Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock, New York, from the 17th to the 26th of February 2023, a complete run that began with Fritz the Cat in 1972 and ended with Last Days of Coney Island, a span of more than forty years during which the rest of American animation largely moved in the opposite direction from everything Bakshi was doing.