Ralph Bakshi, artist, animator, independent filmmaker, and cartoonist, was born in Haifa on this date in 1938. Bakshi is best-known for his 1972 film version of R. Crumb’s “Fritz the Cat,” which was the first animated film to receive an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. His other animated films include Wizards (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), American Pop (1981), and Cool World (1992), among others. Bakshi spent part of his childhood in an African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. “All my friends were black,” he says. “. . . went to see black movies; black girls sat on my lap. I went to black parties. I was another black kid on the block. No problem!” He studied cartooning and animation in high school, and after stints with Terrytoons and Paramount he opened an independent studio. A stream of negative experiences with mainstream film production houses drove Bakshi to innovate artistically, financially, and every other way to produce his adult animations, Heavy Traffic and Fritz the Cat, leading the Hollywood Reporter to call him “certainly the most creative American animator since Disney.” Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, a book of his art, was published in 2008 with a foreword by Quentin Tarantino.
“Disney had such a hold on the mind of America — they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.” —Ralph Bakshi