After getting his start at fifties cartoon studio Terrytown, artist, animator, and director Ralph Bakshi went on to make a name for himself with a string of classic animated features for adults. Films like “Fritz the Cat”, “Heavy Traffic”, “Wizards”, and his adaption of The Lord of the Rings established his reputation as an artist of uncompromising and occasionally controversial vision who wasn’t afraid to butt heads with studio chiefs to protect his work.
Tired of the studio system, Bakshi left Hollywood years ago to focus on his painting. Now, he has returned to filmmaking on his own terms. This time he bypassed the studios entirely, funding his new feature, “The Last Days of Coney Island”, through Kickstarter and distributing it via vimeo.com. That film, the “Last Days of Coney Island”, is a love letter to a bygone chapter in New York City history, a darkly poignant tale of criminals making lives for themselves in the shadows of the New York City amusement park.
Bakshi joined me for a telephone call today to discuss his new film, his legacy as a filmmaker, and his plans for “Wizards 2”
Ralph Bakshi: What’s going on, Random House?
Suvudu: I’ll tell you what’s going on: Your movie. I saw it earlier today. I’m in my early forties, and I grew up watching your movies thanks to my local video store. This is a huge treat.
RB: [Laughs] Thank you!
SUV: Did the VHS boom help your career any?
RB: Yeah, it all helped. It was a better time for independent films because the studios were a little confused when I started as to what to make, and I was able to sneak in with my crazy films. It all helped, and it was all an avenue to get some money. “Wizards” did very well in the video stores—extraordinarily well. So did "Fritz". It was all helpful. That’s all gone, I’m sorry to say.
SUV: I actually own the “Wizards” role-playing game that came out during the Dungeons & Dragons craze, so you might consider me a longtime fan.
RB: Right, I remember that.
SUV: We’ve got a whole new kind of way to get movies out. It’s Kickstarter, which you funded “Last Days of Coney Island” through. Had you done any crowdfunding before that?
RB: No, my son who produced the film, Edward Bakshi is very much alive on the internet and Facebook. He runs our Facebook page, I’m never on there, but he’s very much into that and he said that all of the young people have seen my films, and they really wanted me to do more. He told me about Kickstarter and I thought it was a great idea if it would work. I didn’t believe that it would work: Who’s crazy enough to give money to directors who just ask for it? There it was, and they gave me money—a lot of money: $70,000 which is a fortune! So what happened then is that I vowed to make my five minute movie, but it got much bigger because you can’t say much in a five minute short, unless you’re doing a “Bugs Bunny,” and I don’t do that well. The picture grew to 23 or 24 minutes because I had to put my own money into it because that’s three or four times the length. It took two years to make and I finished it. It wouldn’t have started without Kickstarter.
SUV: Would you have taken advantage of this kind of thing earlier in your career had it been available? Were there advantages to working with your audience rather than a studio?
RB: Well, you know, you just said everything that I’m excited about. It’s a very good question. Look, I was an independent animator, independent meaning I had these strange films I wanted to make. that the studios didn’t buy into, so I kept my budgets low and I still had to go to them for money, so the low budget meant that they didn’t have to take that big of a chance with these films that they really didn’t understand, but they saw them and had various problems, and some beat me up. It wasn’t that good of a situation but it was the only game in town. Now, you go to Kickstarter, and Kickstarter or not, you’ve got these online places like Vimeo where “Last Days of Coney Island” is playing, and it’s an unbelievable situation: It’s unheard of! You get about 80 or 90 percent of the profits, it’s worldwide distribution, you own the film and you put it on there and Vimeo gets a certain amount. The profits go to Paypal and come right to you. Suddenly, it’s the first time in my life dealing with no fights, no phone calls—it’s the most amazing thing. With all the animators in the world today, I don’t understand how they’re not just pouring in. A bunch of guys can get together, make their own film and put it on Vimeo. Do you understand what it is to own your own movie? I own “Last Days of Coney Island,” and I can sell it in any venue. I could sell it to HBO, sell it to Showtime. I could put it back on Vimeo next year. So would I have done it as a kid? You’d be a fool not to, unless you’re just interested in merchandising and working for big studios that pay very well. It’s of benefit to a lot of guys to work at Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks. They make great family films, I guess, and they pay very well to those artists to be not themselves or to be very professional and make people laugh and worry about what your audience is going to think. I didn’t grow up that way. I grew up with Abstract Expressionism. That wasn’t my life, you know.
SUV: You mention Abstract Expressionism, and one of the things that I noticed in “The Last Days of Coney Island” was that this seemed a lot more pronounced. There’s a lot more of an expressionistic, or even gestural style to your figures, and the backgrounds seem to incorporate a lot of assemblage. I wondered how much of that came from your early days, and what you took away from them to keep and what you improved on.
RB: Okay, another question I like. Listen, “Last Days of Coney Island” is the first film I’ve made since I was 22 years-old where I did the whole thing myself, I mean the animation and the background. What you're looking at is my animation and my background: I did everything. I did that because I had to have had money out of the budget to pay the people who do the other work on the film: the animation, the music, the coloring, the work on the animated characters, the matting and the live action. There were a hell of a lot of other costs that I needed to tend to, and I don’t have to pay myself, right? I’d have to pay them the money they need, which you don’t get that for free—you don’t want it for free—so I animated it, and everything in there is Ralph Bakshi the artist. Of course, it’s my life. It’s my love of painting, my love of painters, so you get Ralph Bakshi unfiltered, so to speak. I had a great time. I would do it again, and I’m looking to do "Wizards 2" for about an hour or an hour and a half, which is my next film. That would certainly be easier to do if this film (“The Last Days of Coney Island”) became a success to some degree. That would be what I want to do next. There’s so many “Wizards” fans, and I would like to do that. So I’m saying with this whole situation with online work is amazing to me. I would have jumped into it when I was a young man. Anyone who doesn’t jump into it? I cannot understand it: You don’t want to make your own animated films and make a profit and own it? That’s the way for animators to go as far as I’m concerned.
SUV: You were remixing and sampling audio and visual elements before it was cool. How did you get into reusing old film and found audio? It’s something that folks didn’t get into—the culture as a whole—until something like the eighties or nineties, and you were doing it decades before that.
RB: It wasn’t really anything that I didn’t love. I love old films, I love old photographs, I love the photographers—all the guys in the fifties, Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, and Robert Frank, the guy who shot The Americans, that great book, I’m into old films, I love “The Honeymooners”: I’m into all that old stuff. I saw “La Strada” when I was very young in the East Village of Manhattan, and in those days, compared to Hollywood films, its was unbelievable for it’s naturalness. Then I saw the “Nights of Cabira” in black and white, the next one that Fellini did, and the reality of it blew me away. Then I saw “Scorpio Rising,” you know there was this big underground film movement and there were a lot these underground films, and the whole thing about textures and the black and white fuzzy photographs that the photographers were doing and the kind of Neo-Realism that “La Strada” was about and the other one, and I try to bring it to my medium: animation. I thought to record stuff in the streets and started to use real actors for the voices. In “Fritz the Cat”, If I wanted hippies to do the hippy scenes and the song girls for “Fritz”, I went to Washington Square Park and hired hippy girls. I paid them five bucks a piece and they did their recordings. I love radio. I grew up with radio as a young boy, so editing the tracks was known to me: wasn’t afraid of tape. I heard radio sound effects as a young kid and I understood that they were doing it right off camera, so this whole thing came together for me because I was looking for a certain naturalness that animation wasn’t doing: especially Disney at the time. I was looking for something that was representative of what was going on in the streets. As for the fact that I did it before anybody, I had no idea that they’re doing it now. I have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t pay too much attention to what they’re doing: You’ve got to do what you think is right for yourself and get your own inspirations. Art gives me my inspiration. “Last Days” is a road forward for me again. It’s the funniest film I did with a serious story. It’s the funnest animation that I’ve done in any of my films, and the story flies. I’ve got so much information in 22 minutes: That’s a new way of telling a story.
SUV: Is this supposed to be part of a trilogy? Someone told me that it might be.
RB: No.
SUV: There was a rumor going around that it was the start of a trilogy.
RB: [Laughs] I don't know what it is! The point is, I did this film as it ended. I’m going to tell you why because I like you. When Molly gets shot, everyone thinks that Shorty did it but Shorty did not. When the cops say that they’re going to ask him one more time who did it, Shorty says, “Lee Harvey Oswald did it.” Now, Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot Molly. We all know that from the film, so think of the next step we should take: He didn’t shoot Kennedy, either, you know? That was my end. What I just added to the film to clear it up a little—I added it today because that’s the great thing about owning your own film and being on Vimeo—I had Ruby shoot Oswald, which everyone knows about, but I put in a tracks which wasn’t there before that the clowns say to Shorty on the boardwalk: “Bullsh*t, more bullsh*t.” I think that will clear up a lot of what I was trying to say there at the end: “Bullsh*t, more bullsh*t.” I’m not all that clear on who killed Molly. If I did another version I’d find out. I never planned the film to the extent that they’re all storyboarded out like animation. I like to change my mind: I like to feel myself paint as I’m going. That’s very much what the painting taught me. I don’t know who killed Molly right now. I couldn’t tell you that. But I know it’s not Shorty: It’s too obvious. It might be Louise, who wants to get Louie on her side of the table. So listen to this: The voice for Louise, right, is a girl who lives in the neighborhood where I live in New Mexico. She was born in Columbia and she’s retired. She was a banker—a big deal, making deals and a lot of money—and I got her to do the voice. It was the first thing she ever did! That’s the kind of way to make films, because I loved her voice, and look what she did! A banker! Who would have believed that a banker could be an actor?
SUV: You’ve been a fighter all of your life: a street-fighting kind of guy who came up through the studio system and never let anyone push you around.
RB: People think about me in a lot of different ways, but I’m just an artist standing up for his art. I’m not—nothing comes easy. I used to drink a lot and fight with the studios. None of it was a pleasure, and in none of it did I feel like I was doing something. All I was trying to do is to say “It’s my drawings. Leave me alone.” I grew up with painters—I love painters and I love that kind of art form—and they were always about their pictures. I love Picasso: Don’t tell me how to paint, this is how I paint. This is what I do. Painters starved for their art. It’s very corny today, but they used to when there wasn’t money around. I took the same stance: that I fought them to protect my art. I knew that I was going to make less money doing that. I knew I could not merchandise a “Michael” doll, but that wasn't a street-fighting kid, that was an artist fighting for his art form. I want to be very clear about that: I’m as sensitive and nervous as anyone else. I got killed in Hollywood. I left it a crazy man. They beat the hell out of me. To be quite frank, I didn’t win anything. I got my films, that was a win. They did more damage to me, mentally and physically, with lawsuits and everything, and hurt my family. It wasn’t pleasant. It’s just this is what I make and this is what I do. I’m a great believer in that the director is in charge of his films, and no one is. I hate committees. You don’t get anywhere with committees, you know: They’re usually always wrong. That’s the kind of guy I am: It’s nothing to do with street-fighting, you know: I went to art school— art high school. I was drawing and painting at a very young age, and reading Henry Miller. What I learned from Brownsville, what I had contact with was all of these various characters and people that I loved. My people [the characters of “Last Days of Coney Island”] are losers, but I stand behind them. I stand behind everyone in “Last Days of Coney Island”. There’s not anyone in there that I don’t feel sorry for or like. They’re crazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like them; that I don’t respect them for trying to have a better life. So the street-fighting thing wasn’t me: The artist was me.
SUV: You’ve got so many computer programs now to help with animation. Have you taken advantage of that? Has it changed what you do?
RB: Absolutely. It’s amazing what’s going on with computers. I hand-drew the animation but then you take it to the computer, and now they have this thing called ToonBoom which pencil tests it, and you can look at the action immediately, and as many times as you want, which you never got in the old days: You had to develop the film and send it out and get it back. You’ve got the pencil test, and then you have a program to color the animation, and you hire someone to color it on the computer, but it’s dirt cheap, relative to what it used to be. Now you have stuff like Photoshop that colors the background and puts skies in and the live action in. There’s no end of what you can do on a computer. Also, it’s incredibly fast in a reasonable matter. Here’s how best to understand it. When I did “Heavy Traffic” I needed about 130 to 150 people in my studio to do the film. There’s as much information and scene cuts in “The Last Days of Coney Island” as there was in “Heavy Traffic,” and I used five people. That’s a tremendous saving in cost which allows us to be able to do these films at a decent quality level. In the old days, you didn’t have that money to do full animation, or you had to do it fast and knock it out. I’m glad I’m alive—barely!—to see the computer revolution, and the video revolution, and the online revolution. I think it’s marvelous. I don’t know why every animator in the world isn’t pouring into this.
SUV: With the internet being what it is, and Vimeo not set up with a particular format in mind, do you think it allows you to explore shorter films in a way that prior means of distribution didn’t? I could imagine the studios freaking out over a 30 minute film.
RB: You couldn’t sell it. That’s a very good question. You couldn’t sell it. Being online allows you to do any film, any subject, and any length you want. Anything! It is total freedom. I’ll do Wizards 2 for online.
SUV: I can’t wait.
RB: Neither can I! You know what you should do? You should ask the “Wizards” fans to show up and watch “Last Days” so I can make some money to do it with.
SUV: I hope that they will.
RB: People like things for free, but if you want to see “Wizards 2”… I don’t want to go to Kickstarter again. I would like to make it as proof to the animation industry that I can make enough money on Vimeo directly with “Wizards 2”, because I feel a certain embarrassment of taking people’s money. I appreciated it, but it doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t know why, but I’d rather do it where I don't have to go to Kickstarter anymore. I’m thankful very much for what they did, and if I have to, I will, but I’d rather make it on Vimeo so it’s less embarrassing for me.
SUV: I loved your fantasy films—“Wizards”, “Fire & Ice”, “The Lord of the Rings”—but what got you interested in doing fantasy after so many films on—well, I don’t want to say “realistic” topics…
RB: You can.
SUV: …maybe socially relevant topics?
RB: It comes back to being an artist. You can’t be an artist without loving fantasy. I love realism, but when I want to take a vacation, I love fantasy. I love J.R.R. Tolkien. I loved the “Lord of the Rings books” when I read them, and I used to read science-fiction books in the fifties: Heinlein… short stories… I love Frank Frazetta, he was a very good friend of mine—the fantasy painter. I loved Raggedy Ann, I loved the old Dulac and all those old illustrators—Arthur Rackham.
SUV: I do too. I love the old 19th century fantasy illustrators and have many books featuring their art.
RB: Then I’ve got a story for you. Listen to this. So I go to TerryToons in the fifties. UPA and all of this modern animation is going and all of this old stuff is dead. All the new stuff is modern. I’m working at TerryToons and there’s this old storage department down in the basement. So I go down there and all of these books are lying on the floor, and they’re dirty, and they’re all Rackham and Dulac, first copies of originals. They’re all over the place, and they’re dusty and dirty because that’s the stuff the old cartoonists used to look at. I go to Gene Deitch, the guy that’s running TerryToons, and he’s one of those modern guys who could have changed the whole face of TerryToons, and I go to him and say, “Gene, I’ll paint these animated cells now, but I know what I’m looking at and I’m not really crazy about it. Why did you leave all of those books down there?” He says, “Ralph, take all you want. We’re going to throw them out.” I took them all. They’re all on my shelf now. Every book, Dulac, Rackham, Beardsley, you name it. All of them, first editions in leather. It’s all here, but they didn’t want it! I took it, not because I thought it would be worth anything, but how could you throw this stuff out? So this is the truth of it: How do I like fantasy? As much as I like realism. It’s the other side of realistic. I’m not the kind of guy who does the same things over and over again. You lose your taste. If I did every film as a fantasy film it could be kind of boring to me. If I did every film realistically it would become boring. I go back and forth, but see, “Wizards” was very realistic to me because of the pollution conversation, and Israel, and all of these other things. “Wizards 2” would be about all of things going on in the Middle East now, for sure. There’s lot of reasons for me to make “Wizards 2”. “Lord of the Rings” was all Tolkien, and “Fire and Ice” was all of the comic book stuff that I used to read as a kid and loved. It’s like going home for a moment, but when you do “Fire and Ice” you don’t have to worry about any socially real meaning. You just have to have Darkwolf throw his axe around.
SUV: Yes, but I’m a huge Robert E. Howard fan. I love Robert E. Howard and Frazetta.
RB: Oh, so now we’re really talking! Howard? I loved Howard. I read Howard all of my life. I loved Frank. I love the way he painted, and even if he wasn’t a friend of mine I’d love him, so working with Frank Frazetta for a year and a half was amazing. I always saw him, we always visited each other, but working every day with him was a joy. So yeah, it ends up being a life. I got lucky: I’m hardheaded. I got a big hit out of “Fritz the Cat” and the “Mighty Heroes” that I created, so the first two things I did was successful. People listened to me: I was young, I was thin [laughs] , I had a lot of hair, I had bell bottoms. It was happening with me, so it was easy. I mean, I could be charming.
SUV: You strike me as a pretty charming guy now.
RB: You’re funny. Go ahead.
SUV: I wondered about your feelings about the world in those days. When you made “Wizards” were you worried that we were on the edge of destroying ourselves at that time?
RB: Yes. That’s why I started. I tell you, I think that it’s going to go off with an atom bomb. You can’t stop it. I think it’s going to be terrorists who set it up, if it isn’t Israel that’s going to have to save itself from Iran that’s going to have a bomb. There’s no way they’re not going off. I talk about pollution and garbage and all of that, and that is what’s happening: The seas are dying, the planet’s melting, I mean, come on: Everyone’s got their head in the sand. I don’t know what you can do about it. I have no answers. It’s a capitalistic system that has to keep people working or they will riot. But you know, all this turmoil in the world that you see now has to do with overpopulation and what’s going on with the planet and the fact that a lot of people are deadly poor as compared to people who are very rich, and the squeeze is on right now. Will atom bombs go off? Yeah.
SUV: It’s one of my recurrent fears.
RB: It’s got to happen. We don’t want it to, but anything we say here is not going to make it go faster or slower, but with the anger of terrorists and the proliferation… I mean, Iran, who is a terrorist state, I don’t care what Obama says, if they’re going to leak a bomb out to someone sooner or later, they could. What about Pakistan? Whose not going to invade Pakistan? They’ve got thirty or forty atom bombs? North Korea? How do you stop it?
SUV: I don’t know if you do.
RB: I don’t think that you do at all. I think that’s why we don’t get any message from outer space: No one has figured out on other planets how to stop this, which must be a thing that happens everywhere.
SUV: They call it the Fermi Paradox, right? If there’s so many intelligent civilizations out there then why don’t we hear from them? One theory is that they get to a certain point and kill themselves off.
RB: That’s what I’m trying to say. They go through the Industrial Revolution and finally get to where we got to with the atom bomb. If we didn’t get it someone else would have gotten it. Germany was working on an atom bomb when we defeated them. I don’t know. If you love science-fiction then you know that the traditional science-fiction motif is what we’re talking about, and I’ve never seen science-fiction books that I read in the fifties that didn’t all come true. If you read science-fiction in the fifties, everything they were talking about—what was magic to me as a kid—is physical now. It’s all right here.
SUV: Speaking of fifties science-fiction, did you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?
RB: That’s where I got the “Wizards” idea from, you son of a b*tch! [laughs]
SUV: I love that book.
RB: I was reading a Canticle for Leibowitz and The Lord of the Rings at the same time, and it all sifted into “Wizards”. I loved that book. I didn’t understand all of it, and some of it was very long, but I finished it. You’re pretty good! That’s never been mentioned to me in 10,000 interviews. You’re the first person to mention it. Think about it: digging up the past, yeah.
SUV: Well, I thought about it when I saw the mutants revere these bits and pieces of the past that they go about resurrecting without any way of understanding it. That’s what it reminded me of, a little bit.
RB: Well it should have: That’s where I got it from—a tip of the hat! There are other science-fiction stories like that, not as brilliantly written. I read a lot of science-fiction stories about going back to the past and misinterpreting what they saw, but this was written so well. It caught me.
SUV: Yeah, it made me really sad when I read it: it was bittersweet.
RB: Oh, it’s very sad. It’s a very sad book.
SUV: What are some of the things in “Wizards 2” that you might want to visit that you couldn't in the first film because of the studio.
RB: I have full control of my movies because of how I make them, and I have full control of the technical end because of the computers. I can do anything I want, visually, to a very high degree of quality, and the world has lost its mind. I’m going to cover it in “Wizards 2”: the breaking up of alliances, the amount of terrorists running around. You know, when Darkwolf goes down, all of his armies and technology split up into various groups, each with its own kind of madness. It’s perfect.
SUV: I’ve got to tell you that you remind me a little bit of Avatar.
RB: Of course I’m Avatar! I’m absolutely Avatar. Are you kidding? You have to become your characters. You don’t write about strangers, unless you’re writing for storyboarding or you’re doing something else.
Last Days of Coney Island from Bakshi Productions, Inc. on Vimeo.