Bakshi & Flavorpill
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Feature
Ralph Bakshi
Ralph Bakshi is an alternative-animation pioneer. His controversial work — including the notoriously X-rated Fritz the Cat, a Harlem-based retelling of Brer Rabbit, and a pre-Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings — paved the way for incendiary illustrators from The Ren & Stimpy Show's John Kricfalusi to South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Following the publication of Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, Boldtype's Chelsea Bauch spoke with the reclusive animator about his artistic motivation, what he really thinks of Walt Disney, and the creatures that haunt his imagination.
Boldtype: Who or what were some of your influences as a budding social critic and filmmaker?
Ralph Bakshi: I grew up in a different America, the America after WWII, so I saw all the guys come home, and I heard all their stories. Bill Mauldin, who did Willie and Joe during the war, showed me that cartoons could be adult. Long before the underground and Robert Crumb, Mauldin was making millions of American soldiers in the trenches happy, in part because his work was so real. And I grew up as rock 'n roll was starting to break and jazz was starting to break and modern art was starting to break. I was influenced by the great painters and writers — that whole great period in America: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackson Pollock, Mad comics.
BT: How do you think the cultural scene has changed since then?
RB: Back then, one could progress at one's own speed. Nobody was making money, so you had this tremendous honesty in the work. Whether you wanted to make a lot of money or not wasn't the issue. Love really was a large part of what drove what you did. And we all were poor so there wasn't anything wrong with being poor. The big corporations and all the merchandising you see nowadays just weren't so powerful. I knew that when kids started playing basketball in $250 sneakers that America was finished — I mean, I knew that if you had to buy expensive sneakers to play basketball that things had shifted.
BT: Do you see some of the same shifting values when it comes to art?
RB: My whole thing is to just move on. You have to try different things, change styles, test yourself, to try different genres: I went from the blackness of Coonskin , which was largely about race, to the science-fiction style of Wizards , which dealt with the Holocaust. That's what the challenge of art is all about. Artists have to keep moving on. You have to grow as a person, your reading habits have to change, everything has to go along with changing. And what I despise about Walt Disney is he never moved on.
BT: How so?
RB: His films are really about nothing. I mean the company still merchandises the hell out of everything — every character, every show, every toy. You just want to vomit because he had all this power and all this money to do something with such a great medium, and instead he chose to do garbage. His animators thought that they were the greatest in the world because they basically had all this money to redo stuff. It's bullshit! The graffiti on the side of the wall of a building has more energy than what Disney was trying to show me, so I decided to make films under any conditions. I wanted to prove that art doesn't have to be expensive, that art doesn't have to be commercial, that art can be whatever it wants to be. To me, there's nothing more beautiful than old paint peeling. You walk down St. Mark's, or you walk down the old 2nd Avenue, and you'd have your 300th coat of paint trying to keep an old door looking good. And it's so beautiful! I've got thousands of photographs of just paint peeling.
BT: Do you see any promising animators carrying that same torch today?
RB: John Kricfalusi, the guy who did Ren & Stimpy, is brilliant. I mean John is capable of doing great work. He's wonderful, but he's had a very difficult time because people don't always want to see reality. Bill Plympton is another guy I'm also starting to get a lot of respect for. There are also a lot of kids who contact me, sending me their CDs with stuff to look at, which I think is great.
BT: Rizzoli just published Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, a retrospective book on your career and work. How did the idea for it come about?
RB: Picture this: I'm sitting at home one day, minding my own business, and I get an email that says, "Congratulations, we've sold your book, and we're coming up to pick up the art." And I was like, "You're coming up where? Who are you guys?" I nearly got a lawyer!
BT: What do you hope people take away from it?
RB: What I want people to take away is that the work we did in the studio is really good. Even though we were low-budget, the art is good. You don't need to have Disney's budget to be great. I want the book to go out to young animators who have the same problems today as I did then. I want people to know that it's possible to make your own films if you love it and you just do it.
BT: Are there any creatures or characters that have always been in your imagination?
RB: I've always been terrified of something unseen. I haven't a clue of what it is, exactly, that I'm afraid of. My first drawing in high school was of a little boy in the woods, terrified. There were eyes staring at him. I did a painting a couple of weeks ago of a similar boy. It's an image that has stayed with me since my young adult life, and that's the image that all my pictures and everything come out of.
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