Thoughts on Ralph Bakshi's 'American Pop'

Cafe Society
1

Well, I watched American Pop the other day. I had known about it for a long time as an example of rotoscoped animation that preceded a Scanner Darkly by decades, but never got around to seeing it until now.

My thoughts:

The animation is amazing. I was really enthralled by it, particularly in the earlier parts of the movie set in the 1920s and 30s. Bakshi really captured the look of those times, even if he did “cheat” by using the rotoscoping technique. The warm, dark colors and deep backgrounds were amazing to look at, even if the characters in the backgrounds remained static while only those in the foreground moved.

However, I was confused by the jump between the 40s and the 60s. It seems like Tony (the son of the piano player who was killed in World War II) was sitting at home one minute mourning the death of his father, then wearing a Rebel Without A Cause jacket and hitching a ride on a train the next minute, and then a full-blown hippie in California the minute after that. I’m assuming his father died in the 40s when he was about 10, and then in the next scene he’s a young man seemingly in his 20s, and then shortly thereafter he’s smoking pot in a room filled with people in long hair and bandannas with “LOVE” posters on the walls. What happened to the huge period of time in between? The Summer of Love wasn’t until '67, and in between then and the 50s there was all kinds of blues, bepop, folk, not to mention Elvis who bridged the gap between black and white music - and it was all ignored. Weird.

Furthermore, the blond drug-dealer guy at the end (Pete), representing the fourth generation of the family, was such an over-exaggerated character that I had a hard time getting into that part of the movie and felt that the end was kind of a disappointment because of it. I mean, his put-on accent and mannerisms and everything were just so extreme, and then after all that he plays “Night Moves” by Bob Seger - it just didn’t fit together logically. And the rock medley at the end - I thought it was kind of cheesy and a half-assed way to end the movie. But the more and more I think about it, I wonder if this was all deliberate and an attempt to show that American music had become watered-down and inauthentic? I don’t know.

I did love the movie and thought it was an animation classic. Has anyone else seen it and would care to share their opinion?

2

I liked it a lot. For my money, this and Coonskin were the only things Bakshi made that were worth a damn.

3

I’ve not seen it. I just finished Bakshi’s Wizards and found I still enjoyed it, so maybe I’ll try it.

4

Haven’t seen it. I do remember Bakshi, in an interview accompanying the release of his crappy “Lord of the Rings” movie, sounding as if he’d invented rotoscoping. If I recall, Max Fleischer invented the technique, back before cartoons even had sound.

However, I might check it out now.