Word: bakshi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by Ralph Bakshi...
...Ralph Bakshi dreams big. Turning Fritz the Cat (1972) and The Lord of the Rings (1978) into animated features posed insufficient challenge to a man who contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Now he would tell, in an hour and a half of cartoons, the story of 20th century America and its popular music. American Pop would be a nipper version of Disney's Fantasia, and something more: a dirge for lost patriarchy, for the sermons and sins of fathers everywhere, personified by four generations of American pops. One father would die in a tsarist pogrom; the next would become a friend...
...ROLLER COASTER of a movie barrels toward hell: the lead singer dies, and Tony deserts his kid ("Little Pete") on a NYC street. Bakshi decides to bring the story up to the present while linking it with the past, so Pete struts the street to Pat Benatar's recent "Hell is for Children" (a dismal choice for an anthem!) and stops to look in a doorway where an orthodox rabbi is chanting and moves on. Young punks denying their past! Oy vey! The screen explodes into surreal dance on the edges of razor blades, mouth-piercing safety pins...
...Pistols are as American as the Queen. To use this song as the culmination of 75 years of American pop denies any unity Bakshi once promised...
...classic point to be made about American pop music is that so many types of music emerged with so few lines in common. Bakshi seems to realize this, putting Scott and Janis Joplin, Fabian, and Lou Reed songs in the same movie. But by trying to make more connections than actually exist, he stretches the attractive canvas he has drawn into a demented and confused statement, encompassing family, war, drugs, love, and music, but saying nothing about them...