The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Cool World (1992), directed by Ralph Bakshi

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Greedy", by Pure

     Of all the directors that I return to time and time again on this blog the biggest surprise of the year is always Ralph Bakshi, because I don’t think he’s a good filmmaker. While his devotion to animation certainly helps him stand out in regards to the animation-unfriendly U.S. film industry (unless your name is Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks), across the several films of his that we’ve covered on this blog and a couple I watched outside of it I can’t think of any that I actually enjoyed. In fact in the case of the last film covered, his so-called landmark film Heavy Traffic, I actively disliked it by the end. As a director of animation he does good work and is super influential, sure, but as a director of film, as a crafter of engaging stories, I’m not impressed. Is it me? Is there something that everyone else sees that I don’t, so I keep throwing him in here in the hopes that one day something will finally click? Or am I just afraid of change and prefer to cling onto something familiar, no matter what it is? Probably the latter.

     Released by Paramount in 1992, Cool World was directed by Ralph Bakshi and written by Michael Grais and Mark Victor, the writers behind Poltergeist. In 1945 Las Vegas newly returned soldier Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) is taking his mom on a leisurely motorcycle ride (as you do) when he is plowed into by a drunk driver. His mom dies, while Frank ends up being transported to Cool World, a dimension populated by living, breathing cartoons known as Doodles. Having nothing left for him back in regular reality Frank decides to settle down in Cool World and become an officer of the law, dedicating his life to preventing ‘Noids’, humans who have been transported to Cool World through dreams or whatever (it’s never really explained) from fraternizing with Doodles. Some Doodles are quite keen on the idea of fraternizing with Noids, particularly the seductive scofflaw Holli Would (Kim Basinger), as an especially biblical fraternization guarantees one a ticket to the human world and all the delights therein (why it does is never really explained). For years Holli has been working marks, trying to score a ticket on the midnight meat train to Humanland, and now in 1992 she’s finally struck gold: Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a former prisoner who has used what he thought were dreams of Holli and company to write a famous comic book also known as Cool World. Will Frank manage to keep Holli from humping her way from an ink sack to a meatsack? Also why is a movie that literally hinges on sex rated PG-13? All these questions and many many more if for some reason you decide to watch this movie.

Alright, let’s start with what I liked about this movie. I love the look of Cool World itself, particularly the matte painting backgrounds; The entire city has this rotting, nightmarish quality to it that Tim Burton wishes he could replicate, like the classic noir setting brought to its logical conclusion. I like how Doodle architecture is interpreted in reality, like making the lamp posts 2D cardboard stand ins. I also like that we got some actual voice actors in here, Maurice Lamarche, Charlie Adler, Candi Milo. That’s about it.

Now for what I didn’t like about it...hoo boy. Let’s start with our lead here, Brad Pitt. Now far be it from me to say that Brad Pitt is a bad actor, as he’s had a long enough and storied enough career to prove otherwise, but I will say that this role clearly doesn’t suit him. Not only is he too boyishly handsome in ‘92 to play a grizzled cop and war veteran, but his performance is also noticeably stiff. Which is understandable when he’s interacting with the cartoons, but even when he’s around other human beings he seems really awkward. Not in a ‘this at least 60+ year old man with lingering trauma doesn’t know how to be around people’ way which would fit in with the themes of the film either, more like ‘first year drama student attempting improv’. Even his suit doesn’t seem to fit him right in some scenes, like it’s a size too big for him. I get why they wanted him, if you’re going to be looking at one human face for large chunks of the movie then get one that looks like Brad Pitt, but Bogart as Philip Marlowe this is not.

Then we’ve got our other two major Noids, Kim Basinger as Holli Would and Gabriel Byrne as Jack Deebs. I like Holli enough in the first half, clearly drawn in the femme fatale mould but drawn well, but once she goes human the deviousness becomes more akin to childishness. Understandable in some ways as she’s taking in this new perception of life but we barely see her do anything as a human so we never have a chance to really empathize with her, plus the climax screws over her character something fierce. Jack Deebs you would think would carry about as much weight as a character as Brendan Fraser’s character did in Monkeybone, and he really doesn’t until the moment the movie directly tells us he does, so he’s just kind of there until then.

Of course a poor performance by an actor often comes down to poor direction, and we’ve already covered that point earlier. I’ve heard that this film underwent some executive meddling in order to drop it from a R to a PG-13 rating, likely Paramount’s attempt at grabbing the audience forged by Who Framed Roger Rabbit back in ‘88, but this movie is over two hours long and it feels like it’s missing an extra hour. It’s never explained what the connection is between Cool World and our world, if it’s some kind of limbo area like Monkeybone, and why they would need to build a portal to our world if they’re able to get to Cool World through dreams, or whatever that throwaway line Frank says. It’s also never explained why a Doodle having sex with a human turns them human or how anyone figured that out, beyond that the fact that they needed a convenient excuse to get their own versions of Jessica Rabbit in there, Holli Would and Frank’s love interest Lonette. Over two hours long, and yet by the time we reach the climax it feels like the metaphorical hands were thrown up and they just stumbled into an ending. To call it fulfilling would be like calling a multivitamin and a glass of water a meal.            

That Cool World is meant to be Paramount’s answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit should go without saying, even though I’ve said as much a couple times. Both noir-inspired adventure films where a human detective with an accent has to interact with living cartoons. Which leads us to the major question of the day: How does the animation of Cool World look compared to that of Roger Rabbit? The answer: About 20 million dollars cheaper. That’s not to say there isn’t good work there obviously; The climax gets pretty wild and Holli and Lonette’s movements are fluid, but not everyone in Cool World can be so lucky. A lot of Doodles that barely look barely a step above doodles if you catch my drift, and move about as well too. Not too bad if they were kept strictly to background shots, but the first half of Cool World is saturated with this constant barrage of noise and motion that it doesn’t allow you to overlook. They’ll even cut away from the story so that they can do these little skits or whatever and it’s like yes, I know that cartoons are wacky and chaotic, you’ve reminded me every two seconds for the past 45 minutes, you got anything else to say? Compare to Roger Rabbit, where you get that craziness when Eddie Valiant visits Toontown and the rest of the movie is Toons interacting with real life people. It works because that visit had been built up across the course of the movie, the still chugs along, and Eddie acts as the audience surrogate dealing with this craziness. Cool World by contrast is obnoxious and immediate, and between 70 year old plank of wood Frank and glorified extra Jack we don’t ever have a proper everyman to help process this world for us.

No, Cool World doesn’t get the recommendation, unless you just finished Monkeybone and were jonesin’ for more flop movies that deal heavily in animation. I must admit though that my overall feelings towards the film lean towards bemusement than outright dislike as has been the case in the past. There’s the core of a good idea there, a man who refuses to confront his feelings of guilt and loss retreats into a fantasy world that resembles the familiar chaos of war and the pop culture of his time who is then forced to return to the real world by circumstance, or an artist creates something so popular that it overshadows them and is then pushed into action against their creation in a literal sense (a bit more like Monkeybone I guess), but it’s pushing so much stuff at you it never gets anything done. If I had to rewatch a Bakshi movie out of the ones we’ve covered thus far, it’d probably be Cool World. Or I’d just play Toonstruck again and save myself the time.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Heavy Traffic (1973), directed by Ralph Bakshi

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "On the Corner", by Miles Davis

       Of all the directors I name drop during these movie reviews, I feel like Ralph Bakshi gets the most mentions while simultaneously being one of the least featured. I mean David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Alfred Hitchcock, they each got 4 reviews to their name, which is a lot considering on average I only review 31 movies a year. Bakshi? Well, one of my first reviews was for his 1975 film Coonskin, a blaxploitation reimagining of Joel Chandler Harris’ racist Uncle Remus stories (which still turned out to be pretty damn racist), and then during the 2017 Marathon I covered ‘83’s Fire & Ice, of which I can recall little besides not caring for it. I’ve watched other Bakshi projects before and since, including his short-lived Mighty Mouse series, but for whatever reason I’ve always hesitated when it came to putting finger to button and hashing it out. So many movies and not enough time I guess, even though I’m constantly talking about how many familiar faces show up during the Marathon. We’re killing two birds with one stone in this case then, because today on the Marathon we’re going back to Bakshi.

       Heavy Traffic was Ralph Bakshi’s sophomore effort, released only a year after Fritz the Cat, the film which had earned infamy and controversy by being the first animated film to receive an X-rating. The film centers principally around Michael Corleone (Jonathan Kaufmann), a young man and aspiring cartoonist/animator (wonder where Bakshi got that idea from) living in New York City with his overbearing Jewish mother Ida and philandering small time hood Italian father Angelo. New York City is a rough and tumble town, full of colorful characters and even more full of sex, violence and crime, and Michael is getting none of it. That is until an incident with a legless bruiser named Shorty pushes him together with Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson), a woman as street tough as she is street wise. The two have some big dreams, not the least of which is getting the hell out of New York, but to do that you need money, and to get that you need to hustle. Of course it’s never that easy, and even the simplest plans have a tendency to fall apart at the slightest provocation. Quite explosively, in this case.

        As it would be with Coonskin two years later, Heavy Traffic is a hybrid film featuring both animation and live action segments, most frequently blending the two together. Unlike, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? however, there isn’t really an attempt to unify the two mediums into a single reality. Rather the live action footage is used to give the impression of a setting, like the scene in the Samba Club where the use of old black & white stock footage and shadows in the background is used to create the atmosphere of a bawdy bar, occasionally delving into heavy surrealist territory like the female lingerie scene. The animation quality itself is fine, not as sharp as Disney obviously, but much snappier than some animated Marathon films in the past like Rock & Rule and Gandahar.

       I’ll give Rock & Rule credit however, in that it was trying to be this over the top fantasy movie and it delivered, even if it still wasn’t very good in the end . Heavy Traffic on the other hand is trying to be a drama, which means it’s trying to say something, while constantly undercutting any pathos it might’ve managed to generate. How about that scene where Michael’s acquaintances beat themselves into bloody unconsciousness for no reason? Or the scene where a bird shits on Angelo’s head after he’s just finished beating his wife’s face in with the butt of a pistol? Or getting to see all that slapstick while a trans prostitute is getting the shit kicked out of them? Isn’t that deep? Doesn’t that say so much about the human condition? Well maybe it was in ‘73, back when underground comix artists were drawing black people like they were the mascots for a minstrel show convention was considered hip and edgy, but nowadays where every other adultswim show is trying desperately to get you to believe they’re subversive it just comes off as a frustrating waste of time. Bakshi started his career in the 50s and yet apparently he still needs to grow the fuck up.

        Now some of you could point the finger and say ‘what about Coonskin?’, and it’s certainly true that a lot of Heavy Traffic made its way into that film. In the case of Coonskin however, which at the very least has the thin veneer of satire, the important difference is the sympathy factor. Even if you’re writing an ‘everything sucks’ story, especially if you’re writing one, you’ve got to give your protagonist something to make us care about them, to make us want to follow them down that road for good or ill . Rabbit, Bear and Fox might now have been the strongest written characters in the world (I believe Bear was the only one with an arc), but you liked them, you wanted to see them eventually pull one over on their enemies and seize the day. Heavy Traffic on the other hand has Michael, a guy who starts dropping racial slurs by his second scene and later reveals himself to be a perennial loser ripped straight from the pages of Catcher in the Rye who smacks women around when he’s angry. Why the fuck should I care about him? Why the fuck should I care about any of the characters besides Carole and Ida, the only characters that come close to feeling like real people? The fact that this movie even attempts a happy ending is almost insulting, considering how tone deaf it is to the rest of the film. What a way to spend almost two hours, am I right?

       I appreciate the work Ralph Bakshi put into pushing animation as a storytelling medium and for showing folks a world beyond Disney fare, but the fact of the matter is that so far his track record hasn’t lived up to the hype. I don’t think I’ll be recommending Heavy Traffic, as much as I liked some of surreal imagery the film felt tedious and juvenile and any buzz I might have felt was thoroughly killed. Watch if you so desire, of course, but the options for mature animated films isn’t as barren as it was in the 70’s, so feel free to explore. Or just take a bunch of mushrooms this Halloween and watch Akira, you know, whatever floats your boat.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - Fire & Ice (1983), directed by Ralph Bakshi

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Fire And Ice", by Pat Benatar

     For the last couple entries on the list this year I’ve decided to revisit some old favorites, directors who I’ve heaped praise on before on this blog, whether on the Marathon or otherwise. Of that group of legends, because a name drop by King Thunderbird is such an honor, it seems appropriate that we should start with Ralph Bakshi, one of the biggest names in American animation and one of its most ardent supporters. After all, my review of his 1975 film Coonskin is far and away the most popular review on this blog (hopefully because it’s well-written and insightful and not because racists needed something to beat off to) and ever since that post 4(!) years ago I haven’t touched another Bakshi film. Not because I don’t like me some Bak’, in fact I watched through his influential reboot of Mighty Mouse during the interim, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I needed that time to wallow in self-pity and watch Star Trek, it’s a huge commitment.

     Fire & Ice sees Bakshi taking on much more traditional fare than the underground comix, surrealistic semi-autobiographies and blaxploitation reimaginings of old folk tales: sword ‘n’ scorcery type fantasy. Teaming up with legendary sci-fi and fantasy artist Frank Franzetta, with a screenplay by comic A-listers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, Bakshi and his team of animators present to us a world trapped between two extremes of temperature, civilization and morality. On are side are the humans, in their tropical home of jungles and swamps, ruled by King Jarol in Fire Keep. On the other is the evil sorceror Nekron and his equally evil mother Juliana, who rule over a bestial race of subhumans in the frozen land of Ice Peak. The two peoples have been engaged in a long and brutal war, a war which the Ice side has been slowly winning, thanks to Nekron’s magic. Not content with an inevitable victory however, Nekron and Juliana kidnap Jarol’s daughter Teegra in order to force an unconditional surrender. Teegra manages to escape her kidnappers however, and while starving in the woods due to having no survival skills meets up with Larn, a survivor of one of Nekron’s massacres. As the protagonists of the story, it’s up to them to figure out some way to defeat Nekron and once more restore peace to the land.

     Although mostly they’re just going to give us up-close views of their groins.

     I guess the most surprising thing about Fire & Ice is how god damn dull it is. You’d think that a script by Roy Thomas, a guy who not only wrote over 100 issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian series but his own 50 issue fantasy comic (Arak, Son of Thunder) would be able to craft a heart-racing tale of high adventure, but in 90 minutes it feels like nothing happens and our protagonists accomplish nothing of value. Larn and Teegra run a lot, a couple subhumans get stabbed, Teegra gets kidnapped, in fact Teegra gets kidnapped so often in this movie it goes beyond the outdated ‘damsel in distress’ narrative and into outrageous stupidity, rinse and repeat right up until the end. Hell, Larn, our protagonist and the guy who is featured in about 90% percent of the movie, DOES NOT KILL NEKRON AT THE END OF THE MOVIE (30+ year old spoilers). No, that honor goes to a side-character who has maybe 10 lines and isn’t actually mentioned by name throughout the entirety of the movie. Why? Who thought it would be a good idea to take a movie about sword-fighting wizards in a fantasy setting and make the main characters, in fact make every character beside Nekron and Blackwolf (that side character I mentioned) consistently incompetent? If Roy Thomas had tried to write Conan that way, I bet Marvel would have kicked his ass out onto the street after two issues. This seems to be a recurring theme with Bakshi films, but animation is not a substitute for an actual story.

     Also, watching Fire & Ice now, there seems to be some very, very, unfortunate implications. The humans of Fire Keep, who we are told are good and noble, are white, while the spear-wielding, animalistic brutes of Ice Peak, who are explicitly labeled as ‘subhumans’, are all darker complexions (and ruled by Juliana and Nekron, both white). The few non-white characters we see on the human side are 1) a scantily clad servant girl to Teegra, 2) A crude boat captain who appears for about three seconds, 3) An evil red-headed witch who dies almost immediately and 4) Blackwolf, who basically exists to keep the protagonists from having to actually work for anything. Larn even has blond hair and blue eyes for fuck’s sake! I know this was the early 80s, and fantasy has always had issues with these kinds of things, but it’s hard to believe that folks were that tone-deaf. Of course Bakshi is the man behind Coonskin, so maybe this is him being more understanding.

     The art is fantastic, as expected of Frank Frazetta, although the sheer amount of cheesecake packed in here does test the patience quite a bit. Not that I don’t mind looking at attractive women every so often, when I was starting puberty it was basically my hobby, but there are so many closeup shots of Teegra’s ass and chest in this movie that eventually you just become bored by it. Just like actual cheesecake, it’s best enjoyed in moderation. Also, although the art itself is good, the actual animation suffers from that same slowness that afflicted Rock & Rule way back when. I assume it’s like that because they’re basing the animation on footage of actual people performing these actions (it would explain the stuntmen listed in the credits), sort of a primitive motion-capture, but just because it makes things feel a bit more realistic doesn’t mean it’s good. It still feels, as I said, slow and cumbersome, and when you have a movie where the same woman gets kidnapped five times, I don’t think you can really afford to slow down the action even more than it already is.

     I didn’t have a problem recommending Coonskin, because in spite of some very questionable design decisions, I felt that there was enough there, what it revealed about the time it which it was made, its historical context in regards to animation, its context in regards to African-Americans and African-American culture, that it was still a relevant film worthy of further discussion. Fire & Ice though? Meh, I’m just not feeling it. There are other fantasy movies out there (Bakshi even made two before this you could try instead) and other animated movies (might I suggest Kubo), so unfortunately I’m not feeling much pressure not recommending this one. Unless you’re a Frazetta junkie, which is totally understandable, this is one movie you don’t have to worry about on Halloween.

Coonskin (1975), directed by Ralph Bakshi

Moving away from hyper-violent kung-fu, movies, we're dipping into the crazy world of independent cartoons. Strap yourselves into your metaphorical chairs ladies and non-ladies.

Trailer
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Appropriate Tune: "Ghost Riders In The Sky", by Scatman Crothers

     Beginning an entry is always the hardest part of the whole thing. At first, I had hoped that over time the process of writing would become easier, words and ideas would flow much more readily, or at least smoothly. It hasn’t, I guess because in the end I’m never not going to think of myself as a useless fucking loser, so every time I see a completed entry all I’ll see is stunted, ugly horseshit. It was bad enough to chase away my few Russian readers, even though I was so happy to find out that citizens of a country I was so fascinated by were reading my puny, stupid blog. I’ve already been told that I’m expecting too much too quickly, and I admit that I am, but it’s little consolation to a man who needs to know someone gives a damn about whether he’s alive or dead. Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, who would have ever guessed?

     I have a great deal of respect for Ralph Bakshi taking animation and treating it as legitimate method of serious filmmaking, rather than the standard Disney spectacle. Despite that respect, I can’t say I’ve had a great track record with his films that I’ve seen. Fritz the Cat, the first animated movie to get an X-rating, looks great for an independent film and sounds it like it should be good but my interest in watching it always peters out around 25 minutes. American Pop is likewise an interesting premise, one that I actually got hyped for reading the little blurb that comes on internet videos nowadays, not to mention an impressive design, but overall I was disappointed in how the music was used and how it was presented in the movie (how Bob Seeger, a man whose creative peak was in the 1970s, the voice of the 1980s is beyond me). I also own The Lord of the Rings on VHS, Bakshi’s interpretation of the Tolkien fantasy epic, but I don’t really remember anything about it. I think there were dwarves and wizards in it, but don’t take my word for it.

     So with that sterling run of “interesting premise, interesting animation, poor execution”, the next logical step would obviously be to watch yet another Bakshi movie? I’ve heard good things about the post-Fritz movies he put out in the mid 70s, so I decided to bite the bullet and go for it. This time around, it’s Coonskin, released in 1975 and Bakshi’s third ever feature-length film. And we ain’t talking about raccoons or Daniel Boone this time around kiddies.

     How do I fucking write this entry? The story begins as all stories do I guess, which is vaguely. Randy (Philip Thomas), a young black man, has been imprisoned for a charge we never learn, but presumably has something to do with the melanin content of his skin. Randy, along with fellow inmate/escapee Pappy (Scat Man Crothers), manage to sneak out to the outside wall of the prison, just close enough that the guards are unable to see them as they make their rounds. The plan is to wait until night as the guards are asleep, when Randy’s friends Samson (motherfucking Barry White y’all) and the Preacher (Charles Gordone) drive up to the prison at top speed in a bad ass car, Randy and Pappy climb in, and they’re home free. When Samson and the Preacher get held up by a roadblock and take much longer than the plan called for, Randy begins to get anxious, he’s focused on getting out of prison so much that he’s ready to just run for it, which would surely mean his death to the high-powered weaponry of the guards. To distract the agitated youth from the absence of his friends, Pappy decides to tell a story of three friends, much like Randy, Samson, and the Preacher. Their names: Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear, and Preacher Fox.

     In terms of framing devices, Coonskin’s is passable if a bit vague, but the main selling point of the film is the animated portion. The story of Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear and Preacher Fox, a rags-to-riches style tale in the organized crime racket of hrlem, is done in traditional hand-drawn animation overlaid over live footage and still photography. A weird effect, probably one of the only times I’ll ever connect a movie to Pete’s Dragon, but it’s done in a way that actually gives a sense of reality to a story about anthropomorphic animals killing cops. Which seems to be a regular theme in Bakshi movies, utilizing the relative freedom of animation to show and create bizarre situations, while still keeping a sense of realism when it comes to characters and character interactions. It does get weird at times, as his films tend to do, but all the breaks seem to be either as perhaps a literal example of Pappy’s aggrandized storytelling or to illustrate Bakshi’s grander message for this film. Even when it gets weird or ‘cartoony’ though, they feel as if they have lives and goals outside of what we see in the film. Which is usual the sign of well-written characters, or at least it is to some dumb asshole like me.

     I mentioned that when referring to the title Coonskin that I wasn’t referring to raccoons or Daniel Boone, and I meant it. This might be the most openly provocative movie that I have seen in a while, and I have a fondness for Troma films, which strives to place naked breasts in every movie they make or distribute. The film hits you with it right at the start, with Scat Man Crothers, voice of the lovable characters such as Hong Kong Phooey and the Autobot Jazz, singing a song called “Ah’m a Nigger Man”. A song written by Ralph Bakshi himself, who is very much not black or African at all. Perhaps it’s because I am product of the tail-end of the 20th century, and so for me such direct racial imagery has been relegated to the horrible jokes of the distinctly southern minded people I have known in my life and the comments of any and all youtube video comments, that I was more affected by it than the audience in 1975 might have been. Scat Man puts on a fine performance though, so it’s all good.

     Coonskin is also the source for some of the most offensive visual caricatures of african-americans since the days of the minstrel show. Even though most of the of film’s characters are pretty offensive to look at, some downright gruesome (homosexuals and transvestites get it bad), none of those others tend to be as grossly stereotypical as those portraying black people. And in this case they really are black people, pitch black spindly fuckers with giant red lips, looking like someone decided to dip the Slenderman in tar or some shit. Occasionally they’re represented by animals, in the case of our protagonists, and the women look like someone glued a megaphone to their face. In general, utterly alien to what we think a human should look like, which is actually what I think Bakshi’s intention might have been all along. That there was still a great divide in the perceptions of black culture around that time, those past remnants of minstrel shows and lynchings and monkey jokes, that blacks and whites had to view themselves as wholly different and foreign to each other. I wouldn’t say that this is a film that celebrates the ‘black experience’ either, as it doesn’t try to glorify the crippling despair, poverty and racism that was/is present in Harlem and the South at the time, instead showing folks just surviving, through their wits or friendship or what have you. Which makes it more representative of the ‘black experience’ then whoever the fuck does that in their films, I suppose. Tyler Perry, maybe.

     There’s a sort of running gag in the movie where a disheveled, tiny black man is attempting to get with Miss America, a blond-haired, big breasted white woman dressed completely in red, white and blue, only to be tricked and brutally rebuffed every time. The intent of the scene is pretty on the nose, but I think the power of it lies in the fact that you see it happen, and it you get that visceral physical reaction to it happening. I think it’s the power of animation that allows us convey these messages in ways that can be be more direct, and yet because of the inherent expressionism of the genre doesn’t lose any of its artistic merit. It works for me, essentially, and if a film works for you then it has succeeded as a film.

     If you ever wanted to see the sleek, 70’s response to Song of the South, then you’ve stopped at the right place. If you’re interested in non-Disney Western animation, Ralph Bakshi is going to be the second name you’re likely going to hear after Don Bluth, this is going to be one of his works that you’re going to directed towards. It’s more than something colorful to look at, and it lends itself to analysis and introspection, so give it a watch if you like to do that sort of stuff. Then watch Mighty Mouse, because who doesn’t love Mighty Mouse?

     Nobody. I just answered my own question there. Nobody.

Result: Recommended