It’s a little Bakshi kick I’m on to revisit American Pop after watching Blue Underground’s spectacular Blu-Ray of Fire & Ice (and anticipating the BD release of his Lord of the Rings [1978] in April). A couple years ago I wrote a career survey of Bakshi’s films, which you can read here; I did not, however, rewatch more than a scene or two of American Pop when writing that essay, since I felt I knew the film pretty well. That was a mistake, as seeing it again has brought its flaws more into focus. But first let’s put it out there that this is one of the most unusual, and one of the most ambitious, animated films ever made, and that has to be understood before any criticisms are levied. It is still a significant point that Bakshi was a pioneer of the form, believing that animation should not belong exclusively to children; and to this day, long after he’s retired, the majority of animated films made for adults are not American, but Japanese. Therefore, the list of films he produced during the 70’s and early 80’s remain utterly unique, and still pack a strangely disorienting punch.

I was aware of Bakshi from a young age because of The Lord of the Rings: I have a vivid memory of standing outside of some storefront in a mall, with televisions stacked in the window on display, all of them showing Bakshi’s Tolkien adaptation, and becoming mesmerized and frightened by the Black Riders (rotoscoped–actually, literally Xeroxed–from live action, to creepy effect). I also remember Lord of the Rings merchandise still being sold years after the film had come and gone (flopping)–Frodo and Sam buttons, and such. And my mother would tell me in a low voice that she knew he’d done Fritz the Cat, “an X-rated cartoon,” which, as you’d expect, inflamed my imagination with all sorts of ideas that were well beyond anything that film actually contained. The only other film of his I was really familiar with as a child was Wizards, which disturbed my undeveloped brain with its swearing, violence, and hints of sex. Into my adolescent and teen years, I still didn’t get Wizards (I’ve come around a bit), but enjoyed Fire & Ice when I was just the right age for it and, when I was a bit older, deeply admired his angry and semi-autobiographical film Heavy Traffic. Somewhere around that time I noticed, in TV Guide, that Cinemax was running a late-night showing of a rare Bakshi film, one I’d never heard of before. Two stars, it said, and it was called American Pop. I set the VCR. I suspected the film might be similar to Heavy Traffic or Wizards–anarchic, stylish, cartoonish–but the last thing I thought it would be was a semi-classy animated epic, rotoscoped in the “realistic” style of Lord of the Rings and Fire & Ice. (In fact, this seems to form the second installment of Bakshi’s trilogy of realistically-rotoscoped films.) I was surprised at the scope of the film–flowing through multiple generations of fathers and sons to cover almost a century of history, ostensibly also telling the story of how popular music has evolved, from George M. Cohan tunes to Sex Pistols punk. As the film rushes from one brief setpiece to another, cultural touchstones are checked off (WWI and WWII, beatniks, hippies, and so on), characters grow older or die unexpectedly, and a harmonica is passed down as an unintended heirloom, representing a geneological connection to music, just as each of the four central male characters seek out a career in popular music, yearnings usually aborted by reality, or otherwise leading to disaster.

In college I would show my battered tape to friends and they would usually be astonished that the film existed–and then, at a certain point, bored to tears as it dragged on. I did not believe the film was perfect by any means, but I held to it as some rare artifact, a forgotten piece of cult movie trivia. “Hey, look at this weird cartoon! It has a hippie addicted to smack, and The Doors are playing!” After Heavy Metal–another adolescent favorite of mine–was released on VHS, and then DVD, in the late 90’s, American Pop shortly followed, in similar silvery packaging and also boasting about its rock and roll soundtrack. They might both be R-rated animated movies held back from video release due to music rights issues, but that’s about all they have in common. Heavy Metal is an ideal midnight movie, both juvenile and trippy, with an emphasis on over-the-top sex and violence. American Pop, on the other hand, could not be more serious in its intentions. Really, it is Bakshi’s stab at the Great American Novel. He would never extend himself as far again.

“If you love movies…pop in American Pop!” says Gene Shalit on the box of the 1999 DVD release, so I did as his moustache asked and inserted it into my Sony Blu-Ray player, upconverting the image via HDMI to my new 50″ plasma TV. Now this, I thought, should be interesting. And then I realized that this was, after all, just a DVD from 1999 – the cover image shows one of the American Pop characters standing astride a photo of a DVD, so new and nifty was the technology back then. The back of the box did not specify it was anamorphic. I couldn’t really expect much from the picture, could I? Luckily, the widescreen side of this flipper disc (full screen on the other side, something rarely done anymore) was indeed anamorphic, and the image was quite good. At least this film, which probably won’t get an upgrade of any sort anytime soon, looks just fine as it is; certainly better than any VHS tape from an old late-night cable showing, which is probably what most Bakshi fans relied upon prior to this DVD release. The film itself, on the other hand, remains an interesting oddity while aging a bit poorly.

The story structure, hopping as it does from one scene to another while spanning a century, has two curious effects. One is to make the film seem much longer than it actually is (it’s about 90 minutes, but feels to be at least two hours long). The other is to distance the viewer from the characters emotionally. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often cliched, sometimes deliberately so (I suspect) to give an impression of the era into which we’ve just been dropped, in lieu of actually telling us what year it is. One scene, in which two shy newlyweds step into their new, ridiculously oversized home–purchased by mob-connected parents–would be rather sweet if their dialogue weren’t pared down so severely. They speak the basics, the scene ends. That scene, as with so many others, is reduced to a type of moment rather than a specific moment. American Pop wants to be a grand epic, but it needs to be built from recognizable and precise characters to succeed. From time to time, it comes close to achieving this. I really like a scene in which an older brother, high on beat-poetry and inflated righteousness, berates his younger siblings for watching TV. There’s a nice balance between his self-infatuation and the resigned tolerance of the children, who somehow come off as more mature than he is. It’s a real moment. (It benefits from Bakshi’s canny use of voice actors; the film, typical of his style, leans frequently upon improvised dialogue, lending an authenticity to his animation.) There are also some fine character details in the early scenes, where we see life backstage at a vaudeville show, although the real high point of American Pop comes just under halfway through, with a dance montage, set to Glenn Miller, which turns the rotoscoping movements into a fine art, before dissolving into an unusually moving scene set during WWII, where an American soldier and a Nazi share a brief bond over music before death ensues. For that stretch, American Pop really works, and you can see what Bakshi was aiming to achieve. In the back half of the film, we get the usual 60’s rock bio cliches, as a Janis Joplin/Grace Slick-style singer and her songwriter fall in love, and struggle with drug addiction. As tired as this storyline is, it’s actually handled fairly well and the animation is nicely rendered. Plus, we finally get a chance to spend a sustained amount of film time with a single character – which helps. But there’s a strange hiccupping quality, even to these scenes, as if too much has been cut from the story. We ought to know these characters better. In animation terms, we need more fluidity, more in-betweens.

Oddly, if we do view LOTR, Pop, and Fire & Ice as a trilogy, it’s the last one, the least narratively ambitious, which is the most successful. Fire & Ice has smoother animation, and with its almost crudely simplistic storyline and minimal cast, it can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. American Pop ought to be the greater film. But, as with Lord of the Rings, Bakshi strains against his means–one genuinely feels he blew most of his budget on getting a great soundtrack, as so many scenes feature static backgrounds and only one or two characters moving at a time. It’s easier for me to take pleasure out of watching LOTR as well, since Tolkien cares for the storytelling duties. Of the three, American Pop is the most purely Bakshi. That extends, alas, to its glaring flaws.