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

The Trailer

and

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 2015: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), directed by Hayao Miyazaki

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Lupin III", by Yuji Ohno

     When it comes to animation, few names entail a level of respect and admiration like Hayao Miyazaki. In a market dominated by Disney and Dreamwork’s forever war, the work of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have been the outlier, one of the few to chip away at the saccharine stigma the U.S. has when it comes to animation, like his peers Don Bluth and Ralph Bakshi. Even more noteworthy, he is the only director of anime (or anime movies, to stop any naysayers) to hold any sort of regard in America. People who have never watched anime, maybe even shit talk it when asked, will often give a pass to Miyazaki’s films. That’s power my friends, more than any one of your Dragon Balls or Narutos.

     While he is generally known for his original works, like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki’s first major work was actually an adaptation of the popular Japanese comic Lupin III, which in anime terms generally means using the characters in original stories rather than taking something from the comics. Created by mangaka Monkey Punch in 1967 for the magazine Weekly Manga Action, Lupin III detailed the adventures of the titular character, Arsene Lupin III, the cocky, perverted descendant of the master thief Arsene Lupin (the French equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, sort of a proto-pulp hero). Alongside his team of reprobates: eagle eyed marksman Jigen, master swordsman Goemon and femme fatale Fujiko Mine, Lupin frequently engages in acts of high risk, high reward and high profile theft and espionage, always one step ahead of his arch-nemesis, Interpol Officer Zenigata. Manga gave way to a popular anime series, which eventually transitioned into a full-blown franchise with several films and OVAs to its credit. What Lupin eventually became may not exactly resemble Monkey Punch’s original series, but he’s still pretty awesome, and he’s carved himself a nice place in pop culture to boot. Japan’s very own crazy James Bond.

     The Castle of Cagliostro, though not an ‘original’ story, still carries that distinctive Miyazaki flair that we would come to know and love from his later films. While on a visit to the Duchy of Cagliostro, a tiny nation known in criminal circles as the counterfeiting capital of the world, Lupin and Jigen come to the aid of a runaway bride, on the run from shadowy goons. The bride, as it turns out, is Lady Clarice, the last surviving member of the royal family, and the goons are employed by the Count of Cagliostro, the current regent and huge asshole. Seems that there is a secret treasure connected to the royal rings, and by marrying Lady Clarice the Count gets to solidify his rule and get access to the treasure. It’s a job with little to gain and much to lose, considering the death traps, security systems and ninja guards, but the master thief just can’t sit idly by while there is a lady in need, can he? Add to that a chance to depose the ruler of a sovereign nation and create an international incident, and it’s like icing on the cake. Go big or go home, it’s the Lupin way.

     I don’t know what it is with Miyazaki’s films, but they always fill me with a sense of nostalgia. It’s the same with Cagliostro. It’s not about the bittersweet process of growing up like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Totoro, and yet in a way it kind of is. By 1979 Lupin the Third, Jigen and the others had already existed for over 10 years, characters which to a lot of people embodied the fun and seemingly endless days of their childhood. By taking those characters and placing them in a classic archetypal framework, the hero rescuing a princess from an evil ruler, Miyazaki is telling the audience a modern day fable, substituting characters like Robin Hood or Lancelot with Lupin and Jigen. It gives the film a timeless quality, and it imbues the characters with this sense of magic, this wonder that so often seems to leave us as we grow older. Yet that magic, the unshakeable belief that Lupin will always get away, that Zenigata will always chase him, it’s...comforting, I guess is the way to describe it. Comforting to think that, like with Indiana Jones or the original Star Wars, the world was this amazing exciting place, and that heroes really did exist and adventure was always around the corner. That’s the world I want to live in, and that’s the world that has been taken from me over the years, to be replaced with this ugly cancerous cynicism about politics and the environment and life. I hate it, I honestly fucking hate it. But when I watch this movie, when I watch any Miyazaki movie, I get to remember what it was like, and live in that moment for a while.

     Halloween is a holiday all about remembering that feeling, I think. Like the rest of these movies though, it’s just an excuse to watch something I haven’t seen, so decide for yourself whether it fits your criteria. Either way, it’s recommended.