What do you think of Ralph Bakshi?

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Post by EricJ » January 18th, 2009, 6:21 pm

Ben wrote:The New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse, of which I have around twenty episodes on VHS, was the show that I feel opened the doors to the current TV animation style that Cartoon Network and Adult Swim have picked up on. Certainly no-one took anything from what MTV was trying to do in the early 80s, so one must give Bakshi credit for spearheading that style of show. It grew more and more disjointed as the series went on, but there are some great concepts at work.
Also, apart from The Sniff--which most of the rest of the country wouldn't have known about if it hadn't become the main punching-bag for Early 80's Televangelist Cultural Separationism--literally the ONLY thing 90% of the public remembers about NAoMM, if at all, is "Don't Touch That Dial", which wasn't even one of John K.'s, either.

It later became the most destructively annoying cliche' in the industry when Cartoon Network used it as propaganda banner to try and rebel against its masters:
But I'm old enough to remember a single moment when retro-bashing Scooby-Doo was actually fresh, revelatory and funny...Long ago. :cry:

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Post by Sunday » January 19th, 2009, 1:05 pm

Interesting conversation so far. But what does Bakshi's technique or quality matter when the real value of his work may be just that it exists? Like some large, reddish zit on the delicate face of our friendly neighborhood animation timeline ... at least as far as mainstream attention goes. His raunchy, social broadsides certainly were felt more strongly by the general populace than any other rogue animator I can think of at the moment. The artistic and story merits are debatable, but it certainly threw a wrench in the system and perhaps history will look more kindly at its mere presence in the long run than any element it added to the progression of animation art.

I wasn't around then, however, so perhaps this post is just running off the popular historical filters and inflating the actual cultural weight Bakshi held in his time. It seems like he made a pretty hard dent in the fender and I wonder if our modern ideas about content and audience expectation in animation were shaped accordingly.
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Post by EricJ » January 19th, 2009, 6:23 pm

Perhaps best to say he was the most maverick animator of his time.....BACK THEN:
(Even though most of it came from cribbing R. Crumb's "Most maveric comic artist of his time, back then" act.)

Nowadays, we have drama, insane NSFW humor, and boobs/gore in all flavors and ratings courtesy of Japan, and coming from an entire independent comics-to-animation evolutionary path where Fritz, Terrytoons or smug easy-target Disney deconstruction never existed--
Which is why Cool World felt like such a dinosaur coming from an old fogey trying to do an old well-worn vaudeville act: How can you show them "Forbidden adult shocks!" after they've seen Akira, Cowboy Bebop and Excel Saga?

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Post by OriginalGagBonkers » April 2nd, 2009, 11:41 am

Surprising that this guy had the guts to do alot of stuff that nobody had thoughted of doing during the 60's, and usually it would come from a guy who hated working on kids cartoons...

The first bakshi film I saw which got me into his stuff was the live-action/animated movie "Cool World"... This movie was pretty interesting because it uses different designs on the backround characters...Some of them resembled the characters from golden age animation, Tex avery like wolfs are seen, there are two characters in this film that resmeble Bluto and Bimbo{Characters created by the flicher brothers}... Milton Knight{one of my favorite animators} did some backround characters on this film...But I was disappointed on how the movie was originally planned for...It was like what happened with "Rayman 4".


As I got into bakshi's stuff I looked at Fritz, Traffic, and Coonskin.... Fritz was a crazy movie, Heavy Traffic was one intense movie which had some interesting character designs. As for Coonskin...I consider it as Bakshi's masterpiece... I hope to see a DVD release of that soon. Hey good lookin probally inspired that guy do to lupin the thrid....





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