Word: bakshi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...festival's highlights were, predictably, the well known American entries. Huston's Fat City, and Ralph Bakshi's animated Heavy Traffic. A British entry, Ken Lach's pseudo-documentary study of a family and their "maladjusted" daughter, called Family Life, also drew a surprisingly large amount of attention, attracting one of those impossible, unpoliced Italian lines where people stand three abreast, and little groups from time to time try to shove their way to the front...
...film was generally overpraised in the United States: critics seemed taken for some reason with the idea of using cartoons of people instead of animals, apparently viewing it as an advance over Walt Disney. But few of the technical tricks come up to the level of Fritz the Cat, Bakshi's earlier effort, which demonstrated the possibilities of x-rated animation with such scenes as, to choose one, a fight in a bar viewed from the pocket of the pool table...
...painting of a restaurant or a Godfather parody in which the Mafia leader is shot up while eating spaghetti, are heavy-handed by comparison. The device of framing the film with shots of the cartoonist Michael at his favorite pinball machine is intended to serve as a metaphor for Bakshi's brand of East Village existentialism but since Tommy it's a pretty trite trick. The conventional film segments at the end only expose the paucity of the caricatures and if Bakshi is forced already in his second film to resort to autobiography--he sees himself as a kind...
Heavy Traffic. This is the new X-rated animated cartoon by Ralph Bakshi, the maker of the celebrated Fritz the Cat. It is usually vulgar, sometimes disgusting, and guaranteed to offend you in one way or another -- either through its occasional perversions or its ethnic stereotypes. But Heavy Traffic is good. Bakshi has discovered freedom in the cartoon form, and this is a film of poignancy and some depth. Cheri...
...world will have to wait a bit for the first cartoon Kafka. Right now Bakshi is finishing "a homage to the black man" in the form of a collection of Uncle Remus-style tales called Coonskin. As in all animation work, progress is slow because each movement, no matter how imperceptible in the finished product, requires a separate drawing. "We turn out twelve feet of film a week here," says Bakshi, who disdains the larger animation outfits in town that finish a hundred or more feet a week by using fewer drawings per foot and settling for less lively results...