BSA 206 W15 : Bakshi and Linklater

Today in class we looked at rotoscoping, and two filmmakers who helped advance the technique: Ralph Bakshi and Richard Linklater.

1) Bakshi

This dirty f*cker decided to make animated films very adult, which is fine at first glance, but this n!gga went overboard and decided to go straight for that X-rating. With Fritz the Cat (1972) he created a piece of animation so vile and detestable that our own amazingly cultured tutor couldn't even stand it.



The beginning of the trailer has a great line that instantly establishes the tone, the crow says "I ain't no jive a$$ black N!gga, honey" which resulted in an audible gasp from the class - good stuff 👌

I think the movie looks revolting and can't imagine anyone actually watching this and enjoying it, I have no issues with adult content but this sh!t is just straight up exploitative. The appeal of the film is inappropriate things being said and acted out by cartoon characters and that joke runs pretty dry pretty fast.

It reminds me of another film I tried watching once upon a time from our own prestigious Peter Jackson: Meet the Feebles. The movie is about the Behind the Scenes going on of a Muppet type variety show, but all the puppets cuss and fuck and commit murder. It's a movie that isn't appealing in the slightest (very much due to the disgusting lighting as it is the unappealing content) from a director whose other exploitative films are great (like Braindead and Bad Taste), although those tend towards gore and violence.



There are good adult animations though like these films, things like Robot Chicken, Family Guy and Team America. Not sure why some of these work and some don't, a recent example was Sausage Fest, which was a bit 'meh'. Either we're desynthesized to this type of exploitation nowadays or nothing has reached the offensively insensitive heights of Fritz the Cat since, somehow I think it's the latter. Might be a pretty enjoyable watch with friends though, not sure, will report back.

I suppose the thing that Fritz did for him was bring him into the mainstream concious, sometimes you have to make something really different and unlike other things on the market to get any attention, this certainly worked for Bakshi who's other films never reach the same heights of filth that you see in Fritz.

The thing with Bakshi's other work is that this adult (one could say dirty) mentality carries over even when he crosses over into more mainstream filmmaking territory. That fairy thing at the top of the page is from a movie called Wizards (1977) which was his follow-up to Fritz, a fantasy movie that doesn't need her character design to be so sexual, but it is anyway (probably to communicate to audiences that its not a film meant for children).

  

The posters for his movies were pretty bloody good though. 

Wizards led to Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, a movie we watched a bit of in class - it was very funny to watch as the designs are weird, the movie ugly and just in general poorly made. We didn't watch much but I certainly got a "so bad it's good" vibe from this one.

Suffice it to say I don't like Bakshi's trashy films (applying both meanings of the word here) but the reason we looked at them at all was because of his use of rotoscoping, something particularly prominent in his Tolkien adaptation:



This clip shows rotoscoping on full display, he also did something with the black riders and armies, but that looks about a million times worse (almost like a bad attempt at stylising something in Photoshop):



2) Richard Linklater

This guy isn't an animation director and its kinda weird to see his name pop up in animation history, the real guy to be credited here is Bob Sabiston who was the founder of the new rotoscope technique. Linklater simply used it, having said that Linklater is a really great director, some of my favourite films are his Before trilogy.



We watched a bit of A Scanner Darkly (2006) in class, the rotoscoping in this, and his other animated effort Waking Life, add a dreamlike sensation, never giving your eyes a rest, but I can't help to wonder whether its really needed or not. If it was live action I think some things would have been harder to do (the morph suits being a prime example) but overall it doesn't feel like it adds all that much - especially when you can clearly tell what was real locations and what was drawn in. I am reminded of Anomalisa (2015), a film that uses stop-motion puppets and one that uses its medium in unity with the story.



Anomalisa is a film that I went in thinking it could have just been live-action (I mean its a drama with realistic proportions, so why even bother right?) but throughout the film you realise why it is necessary to be told in this medium, other than just looking beautiful. It's a movie that plays with the expectations you have of the medium to place you in the characters shoes, if this was done in live-action it would not have only been really hard to pull of but also a big giveaway from the get-go.

You should definitely watch Anomalisa if you haven't.

Having said that I haven't watched Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly in their completion, my assumptions might be wrong right again, I just really don't feel like I have the patience to sit down and watch them anytime soon - the animation feels straining on the eyes because of its constant movement, a strange opposite to Linklater's usually laid back and relaxing style of storytelling.