Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen TOO POOPED TO POP RALPH BAKSHI'S ANIMATION THE ART of comedy requires quick cuts. The art of animation, as practiced by Ralph Bakshi, requires short-cuts. The two should not be confused....
...Again, Bakshi's talent, both economically and artistically, is for the short-cut...
...In fact, you might say Bakshi's whole film moves that way...
...But nobody now could afford to run the illustration factories Disney managed in his prime...
...A whole array of illustrator's tricks - stylizations using line like cross-hatching - suddenly come into play and then vanish again...
...Instead of an enhancement, a diversion from the ordinarily flat, sketchy backgrounds, the shot becomes an intrusion, a disturbance, an interruption to the styleless style of Bakshi's animation...
...The animals constantly remind the viewer that this is a cartoon he's watching, and as a consequence he remains aware of the art work...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.BECK, JR...
...This is what gives the wonderful sense of depth and space that every scene in a Disney movie has...
...It permits the film to have an illustrative quality which would seem stilted and jumpy with real characters and situations...
...This may enrich the texture of Bakshi's cartoon for a few seconds, but he still can't pay Paul without robbing Peter...
...In order to sustain at least the illusion of animation, Bakshi therefore moves the camera in these shots, panning or tracking across the immobile art work...
...Each of them moves like a waterbed on which somebody has just lain down...
...In American Pop, which traces the history of pop music from vaudeville to punk rock, Bakshi uses animatic techniques most noticeably in early scenes where the audience in a saloon or a music hall has to be shown...
...The film is a Godfather-like saga of four generations of a single family involved, one way or another, in pop music...
...Doing this story as an animation not only allows its innumerable, far-flung locations and period scenes to be handled cheaply, it allows a certain amount of ellipsis in the narrative...
...The result is a peculiarly amorphous, purposeless movie...
...So far as I can see, the only reason to make American Pop as a cartoon is that it would have been too expensive to make as a live feature...
...If you use today's abbreviated animation techniques on animals, you get something about as affecting as Crusader Rabbit...
...As one monochromatic historical setting replaces another, the only area where Bakshi tries to render some detail and keep the action alive is in his characters' facial expressions, which he likes to show in close-up...
...On the one hand, it's not really about pop music (only one or two songs are even performed in their entirety) so much as it's about the history of organized crime and the sub-culture of drugs in America...
...So in American Pop, as in his earlier features, Bakshi has had to resort to certain short-cuts...
...On the other hand, its attention to history is pretty random, too, as when it mixes up Woody Guthrie with Jack Kerouac and has the third generation of its family, Tony, doing some thirties-style hoboing during the fifties...
...The trouble is that it is only the technicalities of his movie, not the story, that require the camera to move at these moments...
...With human characters, the viewer more readily sees a cartoon the way he does a live-action movie, as if it were real life...
...Instead of animation, for instance, he sometimes does animatics...
...Because his style does have to be styleless - flat, simple, unelaborated for the most part - Bakshi has stuck to naturalistic stories with human characters and bildungsroman plots...
...While fancier, the drawing is now static...
...The whole aesthetic of the cartoon is so extraneous to American Pop that Bakshi actually had his sketch men work from photographs of live models acting out the script, posing for each shot to be drawn...
...This makes him oblivious to the cartoonishness of it...
...This is a technique in which a single still or a brief sequence of stills is used to illustrate a scene rather than animate it...
...In the old Walt Disney features like Fantasia, each frame might entail eight separate drawings done on transparencies and then superimposed on one another in an animation stand...
...But even the faces are bizarrely flaccid and inexpressive...
...It also keeps him from asking himself why this movie should have been made as a cartoon in the first place...
...Getting more footage out of these drawings allows Bakshi to put more into them...
...The shot strikes us the way unnecessary camera movement would in any movie - as being pointless...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
