David Vining's Blog, page 100

Ralph Bakshi: The Definitive Ranking

Hey! An actual top ten! That hasn’t happened in a while.

I had a better time going through Wes Craven‘s body of work than this. The bright spots of Ralph Bakshi’s career rise all the way to the pinnacle of mediocrity (interesting mediocrity, I should add), while the rest of it gets mired in different levels of simple badness.

He was never a good storyteller. He was actually a pretty awful animator. I harped on it more than once, but his characters almost never cast shadows. It seems li...

Cool and the Crazy

With Cool World being a critical and commercial bust, Ralph Bakshi found his last feature film work making a movie for Showtime based on a script he’d had laying around for more than twenty years. Well, it certainly does feel like the work of a much younger and inexperienced filmmaker than someone who had been making feature films since the early 70s, but this is Ralph Bakshi we’re talking about. Getting the young talents of future stars Alicia Silverstone and Jared Leto is kind of amazing c...

Cool World

Some blame can be placed on the production troubles around Cool World. Reportedly, Kim Bassinger approached Ralph Bakshi and the producer, Frank Mancuso, halfway through production saying she wanted to make a film that she could show to sick children in hospitals. I mean…she’d at least heard of Fritz the Cat before she signed on, right? Still, Bakshi’s fingerprints are all over the weirdness of the film, right down the central conceit. An artist draws his ideal woman who draws him into her w...

Fire and Ice

Partnering with Frank Frazetta to create the art design, Ralph Bakshi returned once again to the world of high fantasy with Fire and Ice, a middling effort that brings nothing particularly new to the table while demonstrating that Frazetta’s art was best used in the visual art space of still images rather than moving ones. It’s very far from Bakshi’s worst work, utilizing his rotoscoping technique in its most complete form while doing its best to match with the intricately designed backgroun...

Hey Good Lookin’

It’s really not a surprise that Hey Good Lookin’ is a return to the mean of what Ralph Bakshi was making before Wizards since it was sort of made pre-Wizards as a live-action film combined with animation ala Robert Zemeckis‘ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. However, Warner Bros. got cold feet on the idea, nearly sued Bakshi, and Bakshi used his directing fees over the next few years to fund an animated version himself, releasing the completed film in 1982 after the more mature attempts at storytell...

American Pop

Probably Ralph Bakshi’s most complex and ambitious film, American Pop is a look at four generations of musicians through the history of America across the twentieth century. Based on a script by Ronni Kern, the film holds a surprising amount of interest for its first half, easily being the best work Bakshi had ever done over a sustained period of animation, it can’t really sustain that for the whole thing, steadily degrading through its second half with a pair of less interesting characters ...

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

I hadn’t so much as given upon Ralph Bakshi’s career as lost as I had considered him a man so far out of his depth in the feature film world that I regretted taking on the task of watching his films. It got to the point where I was beginning to second-guess my earlier, limited affection for his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, being familiar with it, having seen it several times over the years, but not really having watched it for a couple of years. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. In f...

Clint Eastwood: A Retrospective

When Clint Eastwood‘s star was rising, in particular when he was working with Don Siegel on films like The Beguiled, he suddenly got it in his craw the idea that he could direct feature films, so, in 1971 he took a small thriller script by Jo Heims and Dean Riesner, cast himself in the lead as well as Siegel in a small part, and proved that he could manage a production and bring a script’s strengths (and weaknesses) to screen efficiently. It wasn’t in line with his common image of the Man with N...

Wizards

Ralph Bakshi wanted to prove that he could make a movie for families, so he made a film filled with Nazi imagery, a female fairy that is in a near-constant state of undress with obvious nipple protrusions, extreme violence, a meandering, nearly pointless plot, and complicated, underexplained politics in a future version of Earth two million years hence after a nuclear holocaust had created competing new species of humans from grotesque trolls to fairies and elves…also magic is a thing. I…I r...

Coonskin

This might be all of Ralph Bakshi’s worst impulses in one film. I know that the reappraisal of Bakshi’s work has placed this near the top, but this might be the most incoherent thing he’s made up to this point in his career. It’s all over the place with something incredibly indistinct to say about the black experience in America while poorly balancing its stylistic and thematic concerns against each other. Derided as deeply racist in its day for the use of racial caricature, in particular ar...