Cinema: Punk Fantasia

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AMERICAN POP

Directed by Ralph Bakshi

Screenplay by Ronni Kern

Ralph Bakshi dreams big. Turning Fritz the Cat (1972) and The Lord of the Rings (1978) into animated features posed insufficient challenge to a man who contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Now he would tell, in an hour and a half of cartoons, the story of 20th century America and its popular music. American Pop would be a nipper version of Disney's Fantasia, and something more: a dirge for lost patriarchy, for the sermons and sins of fathers everywhere, personified by four generations of American pops. One father would die in a tsarist pogrom; the next would become a friend of organized crime; the third would eat Nazi bullets in World War II; the fourth would write Bob Dylan songs for Janis Joplin, and his son would embody the New Decadence, without ideals or issue.

What doth it profit an animation director if he dreams big but draws bad? Bakshi's characters have ill-defined noses and chins, they shrug and dislocate a shoulder, they sing and recede into Peter Max poster-haste. Their gestures and voices are grossly exaggerated; they all seem to have gone to Actors Studio and learned only to overact. They are Bakshi's image of America: searching for archetypal dreams, living out clichés.

The man may not have an eye, but he does have an ear. American Pop lurches to life when he appropriates Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, and, later, Bob Seger's Night Moves, to celebrate rock creativity, and evoke a moment, a decade, with poignant immediacy. But neither lasts more than 30 seconds, and sitting through the rest of American Pop is like watching an anthology of melodramatic scenes from late-night movies, with commercials every ten minutes for Greatest Hits LPs. —By Richard Corliss